A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India [1 ed.] 9780857456731, 9780857455956

Citation preview

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A MATTER OF BELIEF

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A MATTER OF BELIEF Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Vibha Joshi

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2012 Vibha Joshi

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joshi, Vibha. A matter of belief : Christian conversion and healing in north-east India / Vibha Joshi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-595-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Christianity--India-Nagaland. 2. Spiritual healing--India--Nagaland. 3. Healing--Religious aspects-Christianity. 4. Christianity and other religions--India--Nagaland. 5. Nagaland (India)--Church history. I. Title BR1156.N33J67 2012 275.4'165083--dc23 2012013683 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-0-85745-595-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-673-1 (ebook)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

For Arun

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

CONTENTS

List of Maps, Tables and Diagrams

ix

List of Figures

xi

Preface

xv

Acknowledgements

xxiii

Glossary

xxvii

Abbreviations

xxix

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Christianity and the Struggle for Well-being

1

1. A Mountainous State

15

2. Classifying Spirit and Sickness

51

3. Religion of Practice

81

4. Traditional Healers

123

5. A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills

159

6. Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit

193

7. Church and Healing

223

Conclusion

247

Appendix 1

259

Appendix 2

267

Appendix 3

269

Bibliography

271

Index

289

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

LIST OF MAPS, TABLES AND DIAGRAMS

Maps 1.1

Map of India showing the location of Nagaland

16

1.2

Map of north-east India

16

1.3

Administrative divisions of Nagaland

17

1.4

Location of villages in Kohima and Phek districts

18

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tables 3.1

Rituals performed during Sekrenyi festival

112

4.1

List of healers

126

5.1

American Baptist missionaries in Ao and Angami areas (1872–1954)

167

Diagrams 4.1

Genealogy of Zeluovi

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

135

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1

A view of Kohima town from the Aradura hill, 2011.

18

1.2

The mythical stone Tso Tawo at Khezakenoma village, 1991.

32

1.3

Tso Tawo was cordoned off in 1997. The present masonry wall was sponsored by the department of art and culture, Nagaland, under the ‘Heritage Conservation and Protection’ scheme. Khezakenoma, 2011.

33

Two elderly members of Meru clan sitting near the memorial stone, Merhema-khel, Khonoma village, 1991.

36

Aselie standing next to the martyrs’ memorial for the members of NNC in Merhema-khel, Khonoma village, 1995.

37

Kharu (gate) at the mission compound entrance to T-khel of Kohima village. This gate was installed in 1947.This wooden kharu depicts symbols of fertility and valour, 2011.

37

A view of Kigwema village from the national highway NH39, with terrace fields in the foreground, 1997.

39

A traditional Krüna grave, known as shietsa, displaying the personal belongings of the deceased on a bamboo frame. Such graves are now very rare. Viswema village, 1990.

91

Grave of a young Christian man decorated with imitation flower wreaths. Decorating graves with flowers is now common to both Christian and Krüna Angami. T-khel, Kohima village, 2006.

91

Funeral of an elderly man being conducted by a Catholic priest in T-khel, Kohima village. In the photo the daughters-in-law of the man are seen sitting next to the coffin, which was later buried in the forecourt of the house, 1997.

96

1.4 1.5

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

1.6

1.7 3.1

3.2

3.3

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

xii

3.4

Sekrenyi procession. Young men from Kohima village dressed in traditional clothes are on their way to the local ground in Kohima town where members from other Angami villages are also gathering to participate in the annual celebration of the Sekrenyi festival, 2011.

113

3.5

Young women from Kohima village in ceremonial clothes with the khophi baskets sitting in the spectator stand at the local ground in Kohima town during the communal celebration of Sekrenyi, 2011. 114

3.6

Men and women of Sievi ki-kra-mia of Merhema-khel in ceremonial clothes singing sokre-sene at the Sekrenyi celebration, Khonoma village, 2011. 115

3.7

Chakhesang dancers performing at the large Sekrenyi gathering in Tuophema, village of the present chief minister of Nagaland, at which the governor of Nagaland was the main guest, 2011.

117

Zao, the themu-mia from Jotsoma village. He was reconstructing his house; his wife can be seen in the background bent over a construction log, 2008.

128

Zelouvi, the themu-mia from Kigwema village. The photograph was taken early in the morning when he was on his way to meet patients before taking his cattle to the forest for grazing, 1995.

132

Ülieü Viyie, a herbalist and masseur from Thevoma-khel of Khonoma village, 1995.

147

Herbal medicines used by Ülieü Viyie of Khonoma village. She collects them from the forest during the season and stores the dried herbs in plastic bags, 1995.

148

Banuo, herbalist and masseuse from Kohima village, seen here attending to a friend of mine. After a prolonged illness, and having spent several days at the prayer centre in Kohima, Banuo acquired the gift to heal others. I met her at the Kohima local ground where she was attending the wrestling match as a ‘physiotherapist’ to one of the wrestlers, 2008.

149

Zazolie Rütseno of Jotsoma village practises a mix of herbal medicines and homeopathy. He was a laboratory assistant in the biology department at the Kohima Science College. In the background is the old stone fortification of khel-1 which has remained as such since colonial times, and is mentioned in J.H. Hutton (1921), 2008.

152

4.1

4.2

4.3 4.4 Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

List of Figures

4.5

4.6

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

List of Figures

6.1

Kohima Cathedral at Aradura hill is a fusion of Naga architectural styles. Naga cultural symbols are also painted on the monolith outside, and inside at the altar. The cathedral doors are styled on the Angami kharu with the image of a warrior replaced by one of Jesus. Dedicated to patroness ‘Mary help of Christians’, it was consecrated in 1991 when, for the first time, representatives of the British and Japanese Second World War veterans of the Battle of Kohima were brought together at a peace ceremony in Kohima through a symbolic laying of spears, 2008. 195

6.2

A Christian landscape: a view of churches in T-khel of Kohima village from the mission compound. In the foreground is the Rivenburg Chapel, the first church begun by the American Baptist missionaries in Kohima. It is now used as a chapel by the students of the Baptist College, Kohima. In the background is the Baptist Mission church and behind it the Christian Revival church, 2011.

205

Baptist church in Merhema-khel of Khonoma village, which celebrated its centenary in 1996. The sheer size of the church buildings sets them apart from other structures as prominent features in any Naga village, 2006.

206

6.3

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

xiii

6.4

Women returning after the morning service at the Catholic church in Kohima village. They are wearing Angami Lohe cloth. Traditional cloths are worn during formal occasions as an identity marker, but it is not uncommon to see such cloths used as daily wear combined with the universal Western dress, 1995. 209

6.5

Father Carolus Neisalhou Kuotsü, the first Angami ordained priest performing sacrament after the Sunday morning service in Kohima Cathedral. In the background can be seen crossed Naga spears, symbolizing peace, and the painted dao machete. Not visible in the photo is the stylized mithun head painted on the altar under the feet of crucified Jesus Christ, 2011.

211

6.6

Culmination of the Sunday morning service in the chanting of ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Hallelujah’, with people clapping their hands. Congregation at the Baptist Revival church, Kohima village, 1997. 213

6.7

Sunday morning service at the Christian Revival church, Kohima village. The congregation is listening to the sermon by a guest pastor, 2006.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

213

xiv

List of Figures

6.8

The communal Christmas feast of the Baptist church of Merhema-khel in Khonoma village taking place after the Christmas morning service. Young church volunteers are seen serving the food, including mithun bison (Bos frontalis) meat that is consumed on special occasions and is considered a symbol of prosperity in Nagaland, 1990. 220

7.1

A banner at the entrance gate to the local ground in Kohima town inviting everyone to the divine healing services offered by the Pentecostal Church, 2006.

225

Final evening of the three-day Nagaland Prayer Festival held in Dimapur. It was sponsored by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council and presided over by the South Indian evangelist Paul Dhinakaran. The event was attended by more than ten thousand people, both Naga and non-Naga, and was broadcast live on a Christian TV channel, 2011.

228

A banner in Tenyidie at the welcome gate of Kohima village, inviting everyone to attend the praise and worship service in Tenyidie in aid of mission work at the Nagaland state academy hall in Kohima town, 2006.

229

A gathering of all the clans from Merhema-khel of Khonoma village and the representatives of civil societies to commemorate fifty years of T. Sakhrie’s death. The unveiling of a memorial monolith was followed by a communal feast, 2006.

243

7.2

7.3

7.4

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

All photographs are by the author, Vibha Joshi.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PREFACE

On my first visit in 1985, I had two images of Nagaland, the first being from what I had read and heard about their political movement. My father had been stationed there as a police officer at the height of the insurgency movement in 1961, before I was born. This was the image of Nagaland as a place of armed struggle for secession from India, in a seemingly remote corner of India, inhabited by a people who were closer to South-East Asians than to Indians and had recently practised headhunting. The second image of ‘Westernized’, Christian Naga was based on my observations of fellow Naga students in my college at Delhi University. Thus the first field visit to Nagaland was an eyeopener, and both denied and yet took fragments from the two images. It was an introduction to the interlacing ways in which Christianity, so-called traditional religion, indigenous lifestyles and allegedly Western influences coexisted. After a short period in 1985 as part of an MSc field team in Nagaland, I spent three months in 1990 carrying out the first of my periods of prolonged fieldwork. This produced good friends over the years who assisted me as interpreters, especially for in-depth interviews, and who gradually introduced me to the lingua franca, Nagamese (a blend of Assamese and Hindi, see Boruah 1993), and also to the Tibeto-Burman dialect of the Naga group on whom I concentrated, the Angami; however, my command of the latter was never complete. These people were themselves a very helpful source of information, as they provided an insight into what Christianity meant to the educated village-based Angami, who were teaching in schools or working in state government departments at different levels. As the purpose of my research became clearer to them, they not only suggested names, but also sought out individuals in their villages who were regarded as being well versed in tradition and could comment on events which I was able to observe and become involved in. This also brought out an interesting aspect of the interaction between the Christian and non-Christian members of the village from different wards or khel. Through my friends I was also able to interview their parents. Living in the village with them meant that I could attend the Sunday church and other church-related events that were happening in their respective khel. With my younger friends I was able to attend the meetings and gatherings of their age-set and of the Christian youth club.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

xvi

Preface

The introductory fieldwork of 1985 had familiarized me with some of the basic terms and concepts that were needed before the more detailed study. I read Hutton’s (1921a) monograph on the Angami with caution, but found that many of its findings tallied with what I was told in the field, and this helped to give me, for instance, a basic idea of the ritual calendar and religious beliefs, further conveying to my Angami contacts the kind of information I was seeking. Getting to know, in this way, some of the key terms was taken as an indication of my eagerness to learn about Angami. At the beginning of fieldwork, I might sometimes be told that the information I sought was already there in Hutton’s book and that I should consult it. I got around this objection by saying that Hutton did not record everything and that there were variations between villages and, above all, my interest was in their contemporary practice. On the other hand, some people I met categorically told me that it was not easy to write about the religious beliefs and practices of Angami, as there are variations in every village. They cautioned me that Hutton had emphasized the Khonoma tradition, calling them Angami par excellence, and that I should be careful not to perpetuate a similar bias in my research. I always agreed with them on this, adding that more indigenous research should be done to document the cultural variation. Some anthropologists view the ‘friend cum informant’ category of people in one’s field area with scepticism (see Davies 1999: 80–84), and it is true that the potentially conflicting aspects of the relationship have to be kept in mind. But my experience was that friendships were anyway inevitable and in the village were a means of entry into other Naga relationships, in which it became possible to discuss often sensitive matters frankly and honestly. In the present political situation in Nagaland, the importance of this kind of initial and prolonged acceptance is considerable. Partly in response to suggestions made by friends, I also combined my fieldwork with working on other projects.1 One was to write a pictorial (‘coffee table’) book on Nagaland; others included a survey of handicrafts, a comparative study of contemporary textile weaving among the Angami and Lotha Naga with older cloths from the Pitt Rivers Museum collection, and acting as guest curator and co-editor of a book for the exhibition of Naga objects at the Museum der Kulturen, Basel. Through these projects I met people from other Naga ethnic groups and a wide variety of specialists in different fields. Although the anthropologist is the ‘other’ in her field situation,2 in my case the otherness was compounded by my being ‘Indian’ as opposed to ‘Naga’, and Hindu as opposed to Christian. My being Indian was relevant during the insurgency in Nagaland – as an Indian staying in the Naga villages I could easily have been accused by the insurgents of spying.3 How do the Angami perceive me? For the Angami I am a tephrie-mia, that is to say ‘an outsider from the plains’. The cultural difference is accentuated by physical difference because the Naga resemble the South-East Asian peoples. The contrast between the hills and the plains has been the fulcrum of the relationship between the Naga and the non-Naga. The fascination with the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Preface

xvii

binary opposition between the hills and the plains, and the culture of the people who occupy these two geographically distinct regions, is reflected in some Naga folklore. Some of the Naga legends and myths reveal a complementary relationship between the two, usually emphasizing that the Naga and the plainsmen were brothers who separated from each other in the mythical past and went their separate ways (Hutton 1921a: 260–61). The difference between the hills and plains people has continued to be recognized as such. The people from the plains have thus been categorized as tephrie-mia.4 The term may also be applied to the offspring of those Naga women who have married non-Naga. There have been cases in which even after a husband has gone through the adoption process into an Angami family, he continued to be called an outsider. On the other hand, there is an ambiguity about the concept of tephrie-mia. There are several cases of adoption of nonNaga and their induction into a clan. During my fieldwork I have come across some ‘Angami’ men and women who were born out of such mixed marriages. Another term used for people from mainland India is India-mia, literally, ‘people from India’. In casual conversations people often make a distinction between Naga and Indians. The term India-mia is often used for army personnel, non-Naga businessmen, and also when speaking of a non-Naga spouse from mainland India. However, apart from the obvious political connotations of this distinction, I observed that sometimes the term was used for want of a better way to distinguish a person from mainland India from a Naga. Interestingly, I was never called an India-mia. Also, whenever I replied to the question ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Who are you?’ with ‘I am a tephrie-mia’, it was taken as a joke and I was told, ‘Oh, you know who is a tephrie-mia’. My religious identity, especially in relation to my diet, was confusing to some of my acquaintances. On one occasion the niece of my host in Khonoma village made an interesting comment. Seeing me eat pork, she remarked, ‘You are not a Miya’,5 a term commonly used for Muslims in Nagaland; and having a preconception of Hindus being vegetarian and non-beef eaters, she was confused about my religion when she saw me share their dry beef snack. I had to explain to her that I was a non-vegetarian Hindu, despite not normally eating beef, and that it was only in Nagaland that I had the dry snack and that I was generally happy to share food. The exception was when I was sometimes challenged by men who, in an inebriated state, might ask me to share a drink with them. Refusing their invitation would run the risk of confirming their view that Hindus do not share food with non-Hindus (as they eat meat and drink alcohol!). On the other hand, agreeing to join them in prolonged drinking would have meant going against the etiquette expected of a woman. Although rice beer forms the staple diet of both non-Christian men and women, there is a certain decorum expected of a woman and so I generally deemed it more appropriate to share only a few sips or simply laugh off an offer in good humour. In the town and in Kohima village, I observed very few restrictions in my diet, but I tended to be selective about eating food in the village. In general, my

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

xviii Preface

being Hindu was taken as an explanation for my preferred vegetarian diet. In most households I ate whatever was offered to me, but I was also able politely to say no to some food (some kinds of insects), and it was, as far as I know, taken as my personal preference.6 But I did enjoy eating a variety of meat – venison, mountain goat and mithun – and I also tasted monkey, bear and dog meat. In the insect category, I developed a taste for the Naga delicacies – honeybee grubs and a kind of larvae cooked in the juice of bamboo shoot. As I liked eating the everyday Naga food of boiled rice, boiled vegetables, a meat dish and a chutney made of some herbs and dried fish, my hosts often said that it was easy to feed me as I was ‘not fussy about what I ate’. However, meat is a luxury that is not regularly available to everyone in Nagaland. I also carried rations, which I contributed in the form of gifts to the families I stayed with in the villages. Biscuits, cakes and sweets were often my gifts to the children of people I interviewed. I did not pay cash to friends or interpreters in exchange for their help, as it would have changed my relationship with them; also, I had a very limited budget, most of which was spent on transport.7 The choice of where to locate the study was helped by my initial experiences in 1985, which in the 1990s helped me to identify several villages of interest, including Chumukedima, Kidima, Jotsoma, Khonoma, Mima, Kigwema, Viswema, Zhadima, Rüsoma, Kohima, Chajouba and Khezakenoma (see map 1.4); the last two are the Chakhesang villages where the legendary Chitebo tree and the magical stone are situated. The choice of these villages was therefore not random, but was determined by my wish to meet traditional healers who, I had been told, lived in them (except for last two villages). Secondly, I also knew people who hailed from these villages or had family connections in them, and could therefore guide me. I regarded as most fortunate my choice of research topic, on traditional healing practices, for everyone had something to say on the subject and knew a healer either in their own village or another village. The name of the late Zelouvi, a famous healer from Kigwema, was known even to my non-Angami acquaintances. The advantage of my several field visits spread out over time was that not only was I able to meet most of the healers, but I was also able to interview the same person more than once. Similarly, the late Dolhouvi from Khonoma, who had refused to meet me during a couple of my earlier field stays in Khonoma village, finally agreed to do so after recognizing the seriousness of my intentions in wishing to know about his practice. Repeated fieldwork trips to Nagaland had a more general advantage: I became a familiar figure – a person who came back to record festivals and stayed in the villages. Kohima town was my basecamp from where I used to go to the surrounding villages, and Kohima village, perched on the hill, was at walking distance from where I lived. In the town I lived with my Lotha Naga friends, who also had Angami Naga relatives; it was through these friends that I came to know several key people who generously offered me accommodation and hospitality during my village stays, without expectation of monetary gain in return.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Preface

xix

Reaching Nagaland from Delhi and Bombay (now Mumbai) takes between one and three days depending on the mode of transport.8 From Dimapur, one can take either a bus or a taxi to Kohima, which I might sometimes share with friends. During my fieldwork, political negotiations between Naga nationalist groups and the Indian Government took place, and indeed continue at the time of writing. Each time I returned to Nagaland, I witnessed changes allegedly related to the worsening security situation: tales of nationalists’ financial extortion of businessmen and officers – both non-Naga and Naga – were frequently heard and reported in local newspapers; my field trips were punctuated by warnings and news of ambushes; and my vehicle and luggage were security checked by army personnel. The latter led to tense situations, as my Naga friends detested these checks, which they found humiliating, and I had to defuse the tension through friendly banter in Hindi with the security personnel. In the course of my fieldwork I found the relationship of the Naga with the army personnel to be ambiguous. The villages close to the army camps were able to buy goods at a cheap rate from the tax-free army canteen. Nagaland being a dry state, Indian made foreign liquor (or IMFL) was sometimes available to people with army contacts.9 On the other hand, even casual contact with the army could raise suspicions. I purposely kept a distance from the army in order to safeguard my reputation as a ‘neutral’ researcher. However, I kept running into army and paramilitary personnel during my visits to the villages. Early during fieldwork in 1995, there was heavy movement of one of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland/Nagalim (NSCN)10 factions in and around the villages where I was working. On one such occasion when I had to go to Jotsoma village to interview some healers, there were strong indications that members of one of the nationalist groups were taking refuge in the village. Although I had been warned of the situation, I wanted to interview Zao, a traditional healer. He had been away at his fields for the harvest, which had made it difficult to meet him on my earlier visits. On this particular day he was supposed to be in the village. On my way down to Zao’s house, I was startled to find around ten Assam Rifles soldiers sitting with machine guns in the middle of the village at one of the sitting out places. In 1995 and during later fieldwork in 1997, it became quite common to see security personnel patrolling near villages, and high-ranking officials and politicians moving with armed escorts. In January 2001, and during my later visits from 2005 to 2011, I noticed heavy deployments of armed forces and regular checking of vehicles on the Dimapur-Kohima highway and in Kohima town after sunset. It was interesting (though disconcerting) to observe that my presence in a vehicle resulted in a less vigorous check, as the army saw me as a non-Naga and therefore less likely to be working with the insurgents.11 However, this is not now always the case. In February 2011, on my way back to Dimapur town from the Oriental Theological Seminary which is situated on the outskirts of the town, we were stopped by an Assam Rifles patrol apparently because two

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

xx

Preface

miniature Naga national flags were displayed on the dashboard of the vehicle in which I was travelling. The vehicle belonged to the chairperson of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation and was used for travel to camp Hebron, the peace camp of NSCN (IM) which is located close to the seminary. After a lecture on anti-India activity and the secessionist implications of the flag, we were allowed to proceed. The mood became tense thereafter for it was not clear whether the lecture was for the benefit of the ‘Indian’ (myself) or was directed as a reproach to my companion, a senior Naga teacher, for apparently showing sympathy for the nationalists. During 1997 fieldwork, a ceasefire had been negotiated between the army and the NSCN (IM) rebel group.12 This was, ironically, also the time when the inter-faction fights had nearly turned one part of Dimapur town into a battle zone. Almost daily encounters between the two factions meant that people had to vacate their houses in that area. Friends cautioned me about my movements, and I would try to return before dark from my visits to nearby Chumukedima village and church gatherings in and around Dimapur. Extortion and snatching of vehicles by insurgents were frequent occurrences during that period. Rather than travelling alone, therefore, I would use public transport or get lifts in the vehicles of Naga friends. Experiences of some of my friends, who had been accosted by the insurgents, and the general feeling of lawlessness in Dimapur and Kohima towns because of open interfactional fighting, meant keeping alert to what was going on around me and avoiding getting caught in any crossfire. Travelling alone in a vehicle outside the townships generally came to be considered unsafe. Within Kohima it was convenient either to walk the distance or take buses to a suitable point from where I could go uphill and then take the flight of steps that led to T-khel of Kohima village, where my friends lived. While many shortand long-distance taxis are available nowadays within the townships, travelling to nearby villages still requires planning and hiring a reliable taxi, as Naga nationalist ambushes often resulted in my vehicle being stopped and checked during the early years of fieldwork. Although two main Naga insurgent groups, NSCN (IM) and NSCN (K), have entered into ceasefire agreements with the Indian security forces, this has not reduced the presence of armed Indian security forces and Nagaland state police in the region, and the interfactional fighting, extortions and murders have continued.13 After nightfall, the Naga towns, especially Dimapur and Kohima, normally come to a standstill and vehicles are still regularly stopped and occupants questioned after dark. My identity and status invited various definitions in this environment. Whenever I ran into any army patrol near the villages, the personnel often asked me whether I was a journalist. To my Naga friends I was carrying out research on different aspects of Naga culture, and to new people I was similarly introduced as a research student from Delhi and Oxford (and so not a ‘spy’), and on my later visits, as Dr Joshi, an anthropologist from Oxford. A few women in the village showed their surprise and disbelief that someone should come to talk with them from ‘such a faraway place’. My reply now must surely

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Preface

xxi

be that it is not they but we who live away from the action, or so it sometimes seems as one considers the modern place of Naga in a world where rapid communications and transport merge their local lives with those of other localities outside Nagaland, outside India and beyond. This underlines how much the situation now, well into the twenty-first century, differs from that of my initial fieldwork in 1985 and the 1990s during which communication by telephone was the height of luxury in Kohima and Dimapur. Later, especially from about 2005, mobile phones became popular in Nagaland. Since 2007, the possibilities of Internet connections, especially email and social networking sites such as Facebook, have made communication even faster and, with that, arranging interview meetings relatively easier. Without these latest tools it would have been quite difficult to meet some of the key people I interviewed in 2011. It is true that access to the Internet requires a regular source of electricity, which is in short supply in Nagaland, with most businesses relying on petrol- or diesel-run power generators. Getting in contact with state government employees who have good office Internet facilities is easier than with those depending on less reliable private connections. Nonetheless, the Internet has made possible transnational networks and links with the global Naga diaspora, including Naga artists, and writers based in Europe and Christian and political activities there and in other parts of the world. There is now an Overseas Naga Association in the U.K. which brings together Naga students and expatriates at an annual gathering.14 The modern rapidity, breadth and access to communication at first sight make this a world far removed from the picture handed down to us from the early colonial and missionary accounts. Yet, from the nineteenth to twenty-first century the form and content of Naga beliefs, practices and groups are kept variously recognizable, despite being sometimes part of and sometimes opposed to the growth of Christianity and nationalism. Whether as (re-) invented traditional events celebrated as such, or as contestable traces of past claims and activities, there is no evidence that the Internet revolution will dilute this variable continuity in the foreseeable future. The paradox of an internally divided people seeking broadly common sociocultural and political self-determination seems certain to sustain this continuity, for it is its very contestability which provides a focus of ongoing engagement. Notes 1. See Joshi 1989, 1990, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2006 and 2007 for dissertations, reports and publications resulting from these research projects. 2. In most field situations this holds true, although in recent years anthropologists have worked closer to home, in their own communities. In such situations, the ‘otherness’ factor is not accentuated (see articles by Pink, Caputo and Norman in Amit [ed.] 2000). 3. In 1991, in Jotsoma village, I was told by a man that if I turned out to be a spy I would meet the same fate as the three undercover intelligence agents who had been killed in Kohima six months before. Some Angami and Kuki individuals I met in the course of my research were in fact killed by Naga nationalists.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

xxii

Preface

4. A distinction is made between plains people of Indian origin and the white-skinned foreigners, who are called kekra-mia, literally, ‘white-people’. The people of Manipur Valley are called mekrü-mia. The Angami had an uncomfortable relationship with the Manipuri kings, who had helped the British to contain the Angami uprising of 1879. 5. It is a respectful address for Muslim men in Urdu. 6. See Douglas (1972) for an early discussion of the cultural role of food, and Sutton (1997) on how diet defines the identity of a person in fieldwork situations. 7. As has been observed, when one pays a person for a service, it can be likened to a contract with expectations that the person would be available to help at all times (see Srivastava 1992; Das and Parry 1983). However, I was able to pay for some research assistance for a couple of projects. 8. In 1990–91 there were direct flights, three days a week, to Dimapur from Delhi, but since then these have been discontinued, and nowadays one has to take a connecting flight, sometimes delayed or cancelled, from either Guwahati in Assam or Calcutta (now Kolkata) in West Bengal to Dimapur. There are also trains from Delhi to Dimapur via Guwahati, and buses between Guwahati and Dimapur. 9. The alleged generous distribution of Indian made foreign liquor (IMFL), especially rum, by the Indian security forces among the Naga to suppress the nationalist movement, has often been alluded to as ‘the political rum’ by the Baptist Church (see Nibedan 1978: 254). 10. There are two factions of the Naga Socialist Council of Nagaland (or Nagalim): NSCN (IM) is led by Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah, and NSCN (K) is led by Sagwan Sankai Khaplang. 11. During my visit in January 2001, my Naga friend’s vehicle was checked four times by the army in a span of ten days. 12. NSCN (K) agreed to a ceasefire in 2001. Since then, the ceasefire between the Indian security forces and the two NSCN factions has been continually extended. There is a Cease Fire Supervisory Group (CFSG) led by a chairman from the Government of India, personnel from the Assam Rifles and Indian Army that are stationed in Nagaland, Nagaland state home commissioner, Nagaland state police chief and the representatives of the two NSCN factions. Ceasefire talks are, then, held separately with each faction. 13. As a result of these activities, Nagaland state, in terms of governance, is viewed as a ‘disturbed area’, and under this categorization the Government of India has implemented the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in Nagaland. Retrieved 10 September 2011 from http:// mha.nic.in/pdfs/armed_forces_special_powers_act1958.pdf 14. Many Naga students are now registered in universities outside India, especially in Europe and the United States. Some have been sponsored by the Nagaland state government to undertake vocational courses, while others are funded privately or go on scholarships. A few Naga have settled in the United States and Europe due to work or marriage.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to many who have helped me in various ways in the more than twenty-five years of my association with Nagaland and during the writing of this book. When I first went to Nagaland as a student in 1985, I had not imagined that Nagaland would become the long-term focus of my work. This has only been possible due to the continuing generosity and warmth of my Naga friends and acquaintances, all of whom have given me their time, and shared their knowledge, home and hearth with me. It would have been very difficult to conduct initial fieldwork in Nagaland without the help and hospitality of the late Emi Merry. Through Emi, I was able to make some of my closest friends, who have become my family in Nagaland. I am deeply indebted to Chipeni and Mhabeni Merry for providing me with a home in Nagaland, and for their (and their family’s) continued friendship and warmth. Without their support I would not have been able to do fieldwork in Nagaland. In Delhi, I am grateful to the officers and staff at Nagaland House for their assistance in issuing inner line permits. I am indebted to Dominic Yazokie, M. Terhüja, Atuo Shuya, Visier Sanyü and Tsilie Sakhrie for discussing and explaining various Angami concepts which helped me in the analyses of the data I collected over the years. I am grateful for the hospitality and warmth of my Angami friends, who acted as willing informants and as interpreters supplementing my Nagamese and passive Angami. They include Abu Catherine Sekhose, Atie-ü Sekhose (Aty), Puchosale (Sano), Tsilie Sakhrie and Medozhase, and were among my hosts in Kohima, Kidima, Khonoma and Kigwema villages. I thank Seino Sakhrie for hosting me in Khonoma. She taught me how to weave on a child’s loom during one of my visits, and also arranged for me to acquire Angami cloths that are now part of the Naga collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Atuo, Davo Chase, Tselie, Vevi, Aselie and N. Rhetso helped as interpreters in Chumukedima, Khonoma and Viswema villages. I am indebted to all the Angami healers and elders in villages who agreed to be interviewed and answered my questions patiently. Abu and Atie-ü have always made time for me, their sisters Mary and Floret also assisting occasionally. Atie-ü also translated some texts from Tenyidie into English. Through their extended

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

xxiv Acknowledgements

kinship network I have come to meet several key informants during my research, for which I am most grateful. I thank the many officers in the Nagaland state government who have helped me over the years, including Banuo and Alemtemshi Jamir, the late Achum Ngullie, Kusum Siddhu and Toshi Aier. In Kohima, I am grateful to Mhonbemo Patton and Anungla Aier for their friendship. My father’s colleagues, S.C. Tripathi, a former Director General of Police on deputation to Nagaland, and O.N. Srivastava, a former Governor of Nagaland, helped during the mid-1990s when the interfactional fighting was escalating, just before the ceasefire agreement between the Indian security forces and the NSCN (IM). Thanks are also due to S.N. Chamaria and his family for hosting me in Calcutta and Dimapur during the period 1990–92. In my most recent fieldwork, especially on the role of the Church in peace negotiations, I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Arkotong Longkumer, Along Longkumer, Aküm Longchari, Alongla Aier, Kethoser Kevichusa and Toshinaro Longchar, and of Reverend Wati Aier, Reverend Wati Longchar, Niketu Iralu, Reverend Keviyiekielie Linyü, Reverend V.K. Nuh, Father Abraham Lotha and Father Carolus Neisalhou Kuostu, who allowed me the time to interview. Pfukrulhou Koza kindly accompanied me to his native village of Khezakenoma. In Oxford, I am grateful to Reverend I. Ben Wati for discussing his autobiographical book, and for sharing his memories of education in a mission school. Thanks are due to Professor Alan Macfarlane for giving me full access to the Cambridge Naga Videodisc in the 1990s, and for making it accessible to all via the internet. My thanks are also due to Beverly Carlson at the American Baptist Church Mission Center, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for her help with the archives of the American Baptist Mission in 1995. Many different kinds of grants and fellowships have made this book possible. I am indebted to the Association of Commonwealth Universities’ doctoral fellowship, the Emslie Horniman Fund (RAI), the Freer Exhibition, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the Nagaland Governor’s research fund, the Radhkrishnan Bequest, St Edmund Hall College, Oxford University, British Academy, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen in Germany, for the post-doctoral fellowship during which this book was given final form. Many discussions have shaped the book, in addition to those previously mentioned with Angami friends and informants. I especially acknowledge those with Nick Allen, Marcus Banks, Peter Revière, Wendy James, Alan Macfarlane, Charles Ramble, Peter van der Veer and other colleagues at Oxford University and the Max Planck Institute. I am indebted to David Parkin for insightful comments and discussions on drafts of this book, and to the publisher’s two anonymous readers. Thanks are due to the library and computer staff at Oxford University and the Max Planck Institute: Mike Morris (Oxford),

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Acknowledgements

xxv

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Judith Probstmeyer and Simone Dietrich. I am grateful to Birgitt Sippel for formatting the illustrations and tables, and to Norbert Winnige for preparing the maps and the manuscript. Throughout my twenty-five-year period of intermittent research, my family has supported me. I would like especially to thank my parents, Harivallabh and Nirmala Joshi, my sister Abha, my brothers Arvind and Rajiv, and my sister-in-law Tinoo, whose friend Emi provided the initial foothold in Nagaland. I am forever grateful to Arun and David for their patience, love and support, and for enduring my long absences during fieldwork.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

GLOSSARY

dao genna jhum kehou-mia kemelo kemesa kemevo kenyü

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

kerhu ke-sia ketzi/ keji-rhuo-mia kharu

khel

ki kichüki ki-kra-mia kizie kra-mia krüna lohe lohra-mhoshü

the traditional all-purpose Naga chopping/cutting implement Nagamese term used by the Naga for ‘ritual’ and ‘cloistering’ slash-and-burn farming Christians mad or mentally unstable; refers also to a person becoming deaf and dumb as a result of breaking a taboo clean priest (in Western Angami dialect) taboo as well as a prohibition on work observed by an individual, family or clan dirty dead earth spirits carved wooden gate decorated with symbols of valour and prosperity, traditionally installed at the entry and exit point of a village and its wards a Nagamese term (originally a Pashtun word for clan/kin group), used by the Naga for the wards or clan-based spatial divisions of the village house youth club age-set house (in Western Angami dialect) ritual offering of rice beer, in plantain or other leaves, made to the spirits during calendrical rituals age-set (in Western Angami dialect) non-Christian Angami; literally, followers of the ancestral traditions traditional black-coloured shawl with alternating green and red (or pink) stripes along the border traditional white-coloured shawl with 8–12 black and red float motifs, and alternating red and black stripes along the border

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

xxviii Glossary

mekwü mia mithun nanyü narü/natsei pelie pelie-kro penyü phichü-u putsano rodo ruopfü ruotho-mia

Sekrenyi

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

sokre-sene tei-rhuo-mia teigi-rhuo-mia/ tei-giliede-mia tekhu-mevi terhuo-kesuo terhuo-mia terhuo-pe thehu-ba themu-mia thenyi thino Ukepenuopfü usieshü zevi zha zhevo/zievo zu/zutho/rohi

war cry people semi-wild bison (Bos frontalis) ritual, as well as religion improper performance of ritual age-set house (in Northern Angami dialect) an age-set (in Northern Angami dialect) ritualistic prohibition on movement; also ‘cloistering’ oldest man in the village; priest in Southern Angami dialect lineage bad or evil spirits soul a person (or persons) appointed by the first-sower and the first-reaper as assistants who, on their behalf, collect paddy from each household after the harvest New Year festival of the Angami, celebrated after the rice harvest songs sung at the time of Sekrenyi festival sky spirits angels spirit-tiger bad spirits spirits necromancer sitting-out or meeting place, made of stone slabs; each ward of the village has at least one such place divinational healer festival clan Angami supreme goddess – the creatix offerings made to the spirits at a time of illness or misfortune welfare big priest (in Northern Angami and Chakro dialects); used for both Christian and non-Christian priests locally brewed rice beer

* the letter ü is used in Naga languages in place of the phonetic symbol ə

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

ABBREVIATIONS

ABCC CBCNEI CNBC FGN FNR GPRN INC Naga Ho Ho

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

NBCC NEFA NHDTC NMA NNC NPC NPMHR NSCN (IM) NSCN (K) NSF PHC UNPO

Angami Baptist Church Council Council of Baptist Churches of North-East India Council of Naga Baptist Churches Federal Government of Nagaland Forum for Naga Reconciliation Government of Peoples’ Republic of Nagaland (or Nagalim) Indian National Congress Apex body of Naga comprising representatives from each Naga group Nagaland Baptist Church Council North East Frontier Agency Naga Hills District Tribal Council Naga Mothers’ Association Naga National Council Nagaland People’s Council Naga Peoples’ Movement for Human Rights National Socialist Council of Nagaland (or Nagalim) (Isak Chishi Swu & Thuingaleng Muivah) National Socialist Council of Nagaland (or Nagalim) (Sagwan Sankai Khaplang) Naga Students’ Federation Primary Healthcare Centre Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

INTRODUCTION Christianity and the Struggle for Well-being

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religions in Strife Whatever its origins, religious essentialism, or fundamentalism as it is normally known, claims absolute knowledge. Its clerics base their authority on it. Dogmatic assertions harden membership barriers between religious communities, limiting voluntary movement in and out of them. Yet, for many people, conversion to a particular religion may seem the only route to a better life. There is a tension between long-term loyalty and the chance to join another religion. This tension has recurred at different times and places throughout the world. It became especially salient at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the era of so-called globalization, because ideas were being more rapidly communicated than ever before. On the whole, religious balkanization prevailed. But people compared religions, and some either converted to them or set up their own. What do people want from religion? Being able to affirm belief in extrahuman superior power brings personal and collective reassurance, which normally also brings promises of spiritual and bodily well-being and cure. Healing the body as well as the soul thus becomes part of the affirmation of belief. But healing the strife between religions is rarely part of the curative liturgy. The rise of what has come to be called Hindutva in India during turn of the century modern globalization can be set alongside the alleged growing influence of radical Islam within a country that has had a long history of religious tension but also of conversion among Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Christian communities in the lands making up what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A modern focus is the disputed Jammu and Kashmir state, which has a majority Muslim population but was made part of India after independence in 1947. A more recent focus within India itself has been the issue of the Hindu Ram temple at Ayodhya, which was allegedly destroyed during an earlier Muslim invasion and which certain radical Hindus wished to

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

2

A Matter of Belief

rebuild, having themselves destroyed the mosque which had been constructed on the temple’s foundations. This book does not address these complex relations of Hindu, Muslim and other populations making up an Indian politics of religion, by which, according to India’s policy of ‘secularism’, all citizens are free to practise their own religion. These interrelationships are mentioned in order to point up a complex mosaic in which Christians figure. The role of Christianity in India may seem minor by comparison with that of other faiths, yet is evidently of sufficient concern to agitate certain Hindu activists in the country. For instance, antiChristian pamphlets were produced by right-wing Hindu groups at the approach of Christmas 2003, and Christians celebrating Christmas were attacked by one such group, the Bajrang Dal (see The Times of India 24 December 2003; Hindustan Times 25 December 2003). The right-wing Hindu political party, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), also claimed that on the eve of the same Christmas, about five hundred ‘tribals’ in Maharashtra state, including a local pastor, converted to Hinduism from Christianity at a VHP sponsored sammelan (gathering). The claim was disputed by both government and Christian authorities but may reflect the VHP self-professed programme to counter the influence of Christian missionaries in many tribal areas (The Times of India 27 December 2003), where people are sometimes reluctant to enter the Hindu hierarchy at a low level. In 2007 and 2008, in Orissa, the agitation, protests against conversions and persecution of the Christians by the Hindu fundamentalists brought to light the plight of those who choose to convert to Christianity over Hinduism. The Naga peoples of Nagaland in north-east India, who are the subject of this book, have converted in great numbers to Christianity from their indigenous animistic religion, over two or three generations. Unlike the converts in Orissa and in some other areas of mainland India, however, they are sole occupants of their land and have not suffered persecution by territorial neighbours, although there have been tensions between converts and animists. The Naga clearly, then, play a role in the ongoing creation of Indian and South Asian religious diversity, having adopted Christianity in preference to Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, and so expressing their distinctiveness as a political, ethnic and linguistic grouping who stand apart from the various South Asian mainstreams. The Naga are thus part of the wider chronicle of religious strife, while experiencing the more immediate problems of challenging and being challenged by people who support animism and those who advance the cause of Christianity. In this struggle, questions about the legitimacy and efficacy of healers from the two traditions are also religious questions: are the two sets of beliefs and practices compatible, mutually reinforcing or anathema to each other? Or are they all these things at different times? The starting point of such comparison is not in fact whether or not healers of one system are more successful than the other in effecting bodily cure, although this becomes an

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Introduction

3

important index in due course. It is rather the passion of membership and belonging, with evangelical Christians, on the one hand, proclaiming their faith of complete personal absorption and, on the other hand, animists insisting that their traditional methods are relevant for today’s ills and identities, and are not always at odds with newer ones.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Passion and the Pragmatic ‘Nagaland for Christ’ and ‘Jesus Saves’ are familiar slogans in Nagaland, displayed prominently on public transport and on advertising banners on special occasions such as Christianity centenary celebrations in towns and villages. Such overt expressions of homogeneous Christian-ness, however, belie the underlying tensions and the ongoing negotiations between Christian and non-Christian Naga. How did this idealization of Christian homogeneity come about? By focusing on one of the many Naga peoples, known as the Angami Naga, I look at relations between Christians and non-Christians and how this division is expressed through their respective religions and healing practices. Those Angami practising ancestral worship are known as Krüna, while Christians are known as Kehou-mia. This book explores persisting traditional animistic beliefs, rituals and healing, and compares them with contemporary healing as practised by the followers of various Christian denominations. In doing so it examines the continuity of certain beliefs as well as the recent revival of some cultural traditions against a background of extensive Christianity. Such coexistence of belief and practice cannot be wholly explained in terms of religious syncretism. Indeed, the concept of syncretism here begs rather than answers questions, such as whether we are dealing with the joining together of previously separate whole traditions or with a mixture of elements variously drawn from the two religions, and whether such syncretism is recognized by people themselves. Christian and non-Christian are rather to be understood as two broad alternating streams of discourse, the one masking the other but at different times and in different guises. They are part of and only comprehensible through a history of the region, whose peoples have in different situations and times taken on cultural identities during this process of social and political change. Peoples’ perceptions of their own cultural distinctiveness, their resultant cultural demarcations and essentialisms, and their preparedness to adopt and transform different presentations of themselves is therefore by no means a phenomenon associated only with late-twentiethcentury global developments, but has happened before. A historical insight into the introduction of Christianity in Naga Hills informs us of the strategies missionaries had to use to gain a foothold in the area; the disagreements and debates within the mission and between missionaries and the Naga, and those between the missionaries and the British political officers regarding ‘tampering’ with indigenous ways of living. Historical

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

4

A Matter of Belief

events such as the annexation of the Naga Hills by the British in the midnineteenth century opened the Naga Hills area to outside influences as never before. Missionaries were welcomed in certain villages for opening primary schools and providing rudimentary medical care. From the correspondence of the missionaries with the American Baptist Home Board, we learn how the Naga had begun equating Christianity with education. The latter was perceived as a useful instrument to cope with and take advantage of the changing social and political situation. Although Christianity was introduced among the Angami at the end of the nineteenth century, notable conversions took place only after the 1930s. Today, almost 90 per cent of the Angami are Christian. In the last two decades there has been a definite revival, and partly creation, of what people have come to identify as Naga culture. What were once considered ‘pagan’ cultural practices, discouraged by the Christian missionaries, have been revived as part of the assertion of Naga ethnic identity – a process which can be directly linked to the Naga nationalist movement for separation from India. During my fieldwork stretching over a long period, I began noticing the manner in which ‘Naga culture’ was being projected. The field trip in 1997 and the later visits in 2001, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2011 made me acutely aware of the assertion of ethnic identity through this cultural revival. In 1997 preparations were in full swing in the capital town of Kohima to celebrate the 125th year of Baptist Christianity in Nagaland. The main traffic junctions were swathed in banners advertising the upcoming event. The participating villages and churches were busy raising funds by selling traditional crafts, and the youth clubs in the villages had been mobilized for cleaning up the town area. Cultural events to entertain the delegates were being planned with an emphasis on projecting ‘Naga traditional culture’; the local designers had been engaged to design clothes for the church choirs using traditional textiles. In the period 1997–2011, many Angami villages celebrated their centenary of Baptist Christianity, or fifty or twenty-five years of Catholic Christianity, or the establishment of Revival churches. The larger villages such as Khonoma and Kohima designed special commemorative cloths to mark the events. One such cloth designed by Khonoma village, which depicts symbols associated with the bygone days of war and community feasting, has now become a popular item for gift giving and a symbol of Angami Baptist Christianity. The showcasing of culture is unsurprisingly very pronounced in events oriented towards tourism. In the Hornbill Festival organized by the Directorate of Nagaland State Tourism in December 2000 in Kohima, the central theme was Naga youth dormitories, the traditional institution for socialization, allegiance to which was banned by the missionaries during the initial phase of Christianity. The popularity of the indigenous architecture and the events showcasing cultural aspects of various Naga (and Kachari) communities in Nagaland is now the focus of the annually staged Hornbill Festival. A separate site called the Kisama Heritage Village has been constructed outside the capital town of Kohima with youth dormitory huts, each depicting the indigenous

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Introduction

5

style of the particular Naga community. During the week-long tourist festival at the venue, indigenous Naga dances, games and mock rituals are performed by day, and at night a youth rock concert competition is held which also attracts participants from outside Nagaland state.1 These throw up dialectic situations. On one hand, we find the Naga projecting themselves as a Christian people belonging to a Christian state, while on the other, the public celebrations, whether religious or political, assert their Naga-ness through the display of ‘traditional’ art and ceremonial costume. The very aspects of Naga attire that were discouraged by the missionaries in the early phase of evangelization now hold centre stage in all public celebrations. The emergence of a Naga cultural identity redefines their supposedly intrinsic characteristics, but differentiates them from neighbouring communities and from the Christians in other parts of India. In doing so, this redefinition also provides justification for the separatist movement. ‘Nagaland for Christ’, a slogan popularized by the evangelists of the Baptist faith, has now been usurped by the Naga nationalists, especially the group NSCN (IM) that is increasingly emphasizing a Christian identity to the extent of calling their movement an evangelical struggle. Increasingly biblical metaphors of chosen people and chosen land are being used to justify demands to include a vast geographical area around the present state of Nagaland within an imagined or prospective homeland called Nagalim.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conversion and Christianity This combative and assertive turn in the development of a world religion in a particular region raises questions about the consequences as well as causes of conversion, and about whether there is something distinctive about Christianity in articulating emergent nationalist sentiment and political organization. I would argue that there is little in text-based Christian theology that intrinsically leads to such assertiveness, though it is true that particular elements can be selected to justify courses of action as in any world religion. Similarly, differently chosen forms of organization among denominations may shape distinctive social and political adaptations: contrast, for instance hierarchical organization in Catholicism with the more egalitarian, but also sometimes factional, mode among Baptists, at least in recent years among Naga.2 However, there is an important generalization that we can make. This is that the inextricable association of Christian missionizing with Western colonial and technological dominance has been the basis of the development of an early kind of ‘modernity’. It is a modernity which has fostered nationalist sentiment cloaked, paradoxically, in the mantel of universal tolerance and, as we shall see in the case of the Naga, attempts at political reconciliation through community healing. Perhaps in response to popular world media representations of a battle between Christianity and Islam for converts and influence in the early twenty-

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

6

A Matter of Belief

first century, anthropologists have lately turned to the study of Christian conversion and its effects, having focused earlier on Islam. The anthropology of Christianity therefore proposes, and in some cases questions, its distinctiveness as a field of study. This is not to say that Christianity has not been studied ethnographically before (e.g. Peel 1968, 2000), but a concerted effort to form a niche for studies of Christianity has been a recent endeavour of anthropologists working among communities that have experienced extensive or almost total conversion from their indigenous religion to one or another form of Christianity (Cannell 2005, 2006; Robbins 2003, 2006; Bialecki, Haynes and Robbins 2008; Engelke 2007; Engelke and Tomlinson 2006; Keane 2007). As Robbins (2006: 285) says, Christianity is no longer a subject that elicits surprise or a blank response from anthropologists, who are more accustomed to anthropological interest in vernacular or such other world religions as Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam. However, critiquing the idea of an anthropology of Christianity as a subdiscipline as proposed for instance by Bialecki, Haynes and Robbins (2008: 1139) and Cannell (2005, 2006), Hann (2007) writes that the authors of most recent monographs have in fact focused on those societies which have been of ‘traditional’ anthropological interest and that, even when studying Christianity in the West, they have been interested in anomalous or marginalized rather than mainstream Christian groups (Coleman 2000; Cannell 2005). Of course, much depends on the idea of mainstream here, for, as Jenkins shows in his aptly titled study, Religion in English Everyday Life (1999), Christianity may be socially understated in England but is in fact widely implicit in rural and small town life through local activities, ceremonies and symbolism, and through a concern for what he calls ‘human flourishing’. Still, Hann’s critique points up the major concern in the anthropology of Christianity with relatively recent cases of widespread conversion in societies still able to remember a past dominated by pre-Christian practices. The Naga are certainly one such society. I did not set out to make this study of the Naga a contribution to the anthropology of Christianity. My fieldwork in Naga society began in 1985 with an interest in traditional healers, especially in relation to an important preChristian festival called Sekrenyi concerned among other things with bodily and spiritual health. But some of the healers had converted to Christianity and it was relevant to understand the role of Christianity in their healing practices. One could say that my research at the outset and throughout has focused on Naga as a people, including its healers, some of whom are Christian. Some anthropologists make a similar claim when they say that they study not Islam but Muslim society, or people who happen to be Muslims, among whom healing is a facet of their daily lives as well as their religion. That said, it became clear that I could not study Naga healers without also following the path of Christianity among them, understanding why some joined the religion and why others did not.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

7

Here, it seems to me that what is really at issue in much of the anthropology of Christianity cited above is the process of conversion and the play of motivations, incentives, inducements, encouragements, directives and constraints operating among the various actors in a history of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial contexts. The notion of conversion is clearly broad. It may sometimes be taken to imply change from one absolute state to another, or it may be regarded as fragmentary and full of stops, starts, reverses, advances, contraction and outreach. Moreover, Christian conversion as studied by anthropologists has nearly always had global connections, and continues to have such connections, even though many Christian communities now emphasize the indigenous nature of their church. Regional flavours, so to speak, have come to characterize Christianity in India (and elsewhere) as shown by anthropological studies of Christianity in Southern India by Caplan (1987), Mosse (1994, 1996, 2006) and Viswanathan ([1993] 2010). The paradox of a world religion becoming made up of different regionally shaped versions points to the changes it may sustain in the process of its global transfer. Thomas Csordas (2009) focuses on the transportability of religions, the ‘means by which they traverse geographic and cultural space’ (ibid.: 5) and the global nature of such travel. However, what the innovative collection does not fully explain nor provide insight into is the agency of the ‘transporter’ and that of the recipient, and the criteria for selection – who selects, and what is being selected for, in this transnational transcendence?3 What, then, can a new religion offer, and what is appropriated by the converts? An overview of missionary strategy quickly demonstrates that ‘civilizing’ and ‘educating the pagans’ were at the top of the agenda. So-called modernity was expressed as new lifestyles, and through the introduction of practices of hygiene, biomedicine, different (though not always better) skills of vegetable gardening and animal husbandry, and, as part of educational instruction, a capacity to argue and debate with colonial and postcolonial authorities on the latter’s terms, as we shall see among Naga. Modernity, as an increasingly pervasive and nominally coherent worldview, thus became intertwined with Christian conversion (see van der Veer 1996), at least by those with the authority to pronounce on it. Of course, the experience and reasons for conversion itself are unlikely to be understood by the converted through a singular and coherent notion of modernity. Individuals have their own specific and often highly varying reasons for conversion. They may simply follow relatives, friends or loved ones into the church or a different sect. Or their reasons for conversion or change of church may be glossed as being ‘rational’ choices, as has historically characterized Christianity: why worship through a priest or other human intermediary when another church allows you to communicate with God more directly?; or why direct resources to outward appearances when humble personal submission to God is all that is required? – and so on. Or there may be seen to be other advantages in conversion or changing one’s sect. Smilde (2007: 7) recalls being

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

8

A Matter of Belief

told by one acquaintance that her reason for leaving the Catholic church was due to a ‘better deal’ being offered by the evangelical church when the family moved from a small town to the bigger city of Bogota. What constitutes a better deal will itself vary according to needs, wants and what is provided, but indicates the undeniable pragmatic aspect of many such choices, involving perhaps improved educational or biomedical access and entitlement. Of course these material benefits are not necessarily viewed as such but may well be couched in genuinely felt emotional responses, such as the pull of spiritual intensity and performativity of prayer in one church as against another, which happens also to be associated with such benefits. Obtaining advantage through conversion or changing sects does not, after all, by itself devalue piety, provided that the sanctity and sincerity of worship are shared by the Christian community as a whole: one’s commitment to God moves with one, ostensibly regardless of improved circumstances. The support offered by the various church organizations, their sometimes varying liturgies, the relative attractiveness of their modes of worship, and interpersonal influences thus variously occur as factors in conversion and in changing allegiance from one sect to another. Now, while it is sometimes possible for a convert or outside analyst to identify the interpersonal, aestheticemotional, rational and material factors in individual decisions, as evident in Smilde’s example, it may in practice be difficult to distinguish them as separable motives. After all, the viability of a religious system generally depends on motivations remaining mutually embedded and opaque, lest belief be reduced to challengeable propositions. That said, people do talk to each other about their and others’ conversion or changing sect membership, as happens among the Naga, and in so doing present a kind of panoply of reasons for preferring one church or sect to another. How does this portrait of a plethora of individual conversions making up the panoply square with Joel Robbins’ (2004) examination of conversion through the Paulin category of rupture, which he explains as a break from the past? He exemplifies this through the stark contrast of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the lives of the converts in the small community of Urapmin in Papua New Guinea. Robbins and colleagues sympathetic to his position are of course perfectly aware that the ‘radical discontinuity’, allegedly created by Christianity (Cannell 2006: 14) and understood through the ‘trope of rupture’ (Bialecki, Haynes and Robbins 2008: 1144–45), is in fact always in tension with continuing preChristian spiritual practices and theories of society. But they insist that there is ineluctable movement through Christianity to sociocultural transformations, transcultural engagements and even language, which permanently transcend local structures of action and conviction. They claim that to stay with the counter-argument that people can accommodate both pre-Christian and Christian beliefs in indefinite syncretistic continuity is to deny that people can enlarge their orbit of discussion and understanding, and learn anything new.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

9

Some discomfort has been expressed with regard to the notion of rupture. Hann and Goltz (2010: 7) suggest that this model of radical discontinuity may well fit Robbins’ use of Protestantism as his ideal type, but it jars with the case of the Eastern Christians who, by contrast, emphasize continuity in their representations of themselves. If, then, the trope fits some but not all versions of Christianity, this challenges any tendency to think of the religion as sufficiently homogeneous in its effects on people’s perceptions to warrant such generalizations, or at least opens the door to suggestions that we look at its non-religious contexts as being more important in determining how the religion is viewed by its adherents than its intrinsic properties. In some respects the idea of rupture can be applied to Naga conversion, at least within the broad sweep of recent history, and since the Second World War especially. After all, we need only to retreat two or three generations to a past when few Naga were Christian and when those aspects of modernity mentioned above were subordinated to a powerfully predominant animistic worldview. But, as we see in the following chapters, while conversion can indeed be seen as a historical break with the past at a certain level of abstraction, it is also, and more immediately from the viewpoint of people who interact with each other, a series of overlapping acts of conversion and changing church membership, of competition between churches, and of conflict between burgeoning Christianity as a whole and important remaining aspects of animism. Phenomenologically, this is the experience of patchy continuity more than a clean rupture, of everyday struggle against the broad sweep of history too remote to be immediately visible. That is to say, some religious ideas are discarded while others accommodate each other and sometimes overlap in indigenous theological analysis, doing so not in any linear sequence but through forward and backward loops and at different times from each other. The rupture that did take place was surely more to do with the change in the political situation, with the British period of colonization, the subsequent annexation of Naga villages and the banning of inter-village warfare. A decline of associated rituals and with this the inability to earn merit through warfare, as well as a totally different power equation that colonial administration brought, stifled traditional Naga aspirations for achievement and so created a gap which missionary education and evangelical activities filled with varying degrees of success, but not to the extent of snuffing out all lines of animistic explanation and practice. The Christianizing process as such was, then, far from smooth. For instance, although Christianity among the Naga gained a foothold through education and medical work, it also experienced several setbacks, including diffidence and what was called ‘backsliding’ on the part of converts, and the subsequent disbanding of some churches and schools due to missionaries’ differing opinions as to what being a Christian meant. Some sought strict discipline by trying to ban the drinking of local rice beer, the curative sacrifice of animals during illnesses, and the participation in many communal activities, as well as

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

10

A Matter of Belief

by seeking to change traditional ways of clothing the body. Complicating internal differences among Naga as well as between Naga and missionaries, some new converts even took on this puritanical behaviour in order to distinguish themselves from their ‘pagan’, animistic fellow villagers, for instance replacing rice beer with black tea as among the Ao and, later, other Naga groups.4 Similarly, in the early period of Christian conversion in the Angami area, converts objected to the efforts of Reverend Supplee, the American missionary, to set the melody of the translated hymns to Angami folktunes, as it reminded them of the ‘heathen’ lives that they were no longer part of (Peseye 2003: 153). However, reinforcing my suggestion that Naga Christianity is a process of twists and turns, there has since been a reversal, with the Catholic church in Angami Jakhama village introducing hymns sung to indigenous folk melodies, some churches compiling their own song collections, and some combining folk melody with indigenous hymnody based on Bible translations. A kind of remaking of the past in the present also occurs in recent attempts to explain indigenous concepts of divinity through analogy with Christian concepts, as for instance in Ao’s (1994) Tsungremology: Ao Naga Christian Theology, in which he discusses points of similarity as well as departure. In the Naga context, then, it may not be helpful to view conversion through the lens of absolute rupture or radical discontinuity, or even as expressed by people as a break with the past. It is not that the idea is necessarily wrong but that it does not tell us much and, moreover, diverts focus away from the very present conflicts of affiliation, loyalty and interpretation between which people navigate. I sympathize with the point made by James and Johnson (1988) that the study of Christianity should start from adherent’s interpretation of their experiences, and not reduce it to politico-economic explanation. But we do need to identify those situations, as among the Naga, where political and economic factors are strongly associated both with widespread Christian conversion and with a kind of rewriting of indigenous theological ideas and practices seen sometimes as antithetical to Christianity, but increasingly seen as complementary. The increase in the number of converts during the Christian revivals in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s does in fact coincide with the marked strengthening of the Naga nationalist movement and the brutal Indian Army action against villagers to quell or curb the armed insurgency in the area, while later attempts at political peace making draw on a combination of Christian and indigenous religious appeals, including those of animistic healing. The Christian concept of healing soul and body, and the work of traditional healers – including those who adapt to the church – thus come together, despite their differences, in this spirit of reconciliation. The routes taken among Naga to reach this position, and their possible success or failure, are the subject of this book. Focusing on the Angami group, whose area was the heartland of Second World War battles, the book looks as much at concepts of the body, disease and illness, curative rituals, and the lives of healers as it does at contemporary

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Introduction

11

Christian healing as practised by Pentecostal and Revival churches (including both Catholic and Baptist). Together, these concepts and narratives provide the outlines of Naga debate in an idiom of national well-being, cure and common cultural identity, despite continuing conflict. So, animistic healers argue with those of the church. Villages, clans and sub-groups fight over the refusal of Christians to support non-Christian events, or over different church loyalties. Churches themselves compete with each other, or oscillate in their support for, or opposition to, the nationalist militia. But this language of argument, to use Edmund Leach’s memorable phrase, in fact sets the terms for talking about the needs and future of the Naga peoples as a whole. For by highlighting so openly what divides them, Naga can talk also about how to heal the divisions. Healing people’s bodies, minds and interpersonal relationships, and healing the bloody conflicts between Naga nationalist factions, become metaphors of each other. Whether the talking results in a solution is another question which has been addressed elsewhere in the world where, as in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there have been attempts to quell vengefulness and seek peace by healing the wounds of war. Among Naga, the driver here is the quest for cures, with Christianity as the vehicle.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Plan of the Book The story opens in chapter 1 by showing how the Naga peoples, geographically separated from each other by mountain, river and forest, speaking often markedly different Tibeto-Burman languages and dialects, and with cultural differences arising from similarity, were thrown together in a new and perhaps greater sense of ethnic self-consciousness through the interventions of British colonialism in this part of north-east India. Politically part of India and yet ethno-linguistically and culturally closer to South-East Asians, the Naga stand out as already linked in diverse directions to peoples and areas beyond their immediate homes, with Christianity now playing an increasing role in their nationalistic demands for autonomy or independence, as described later in the book. The modern process of globalization is thus in part a continuation of this people ‘ever-in-the-making’. Set apart from mainland India and enjoying a distinctive sociocultural status, much exoticized in early European accounts of them, they enthusiastically and rapidly adopted Christianity, while retaining fundamental animistic beliefs, rituals, methods of healing, and traditional modes of village and clan organization. This is not however static sociocultural syncretism but a dynamic playing out of the tension between movement towards ideas of nationhood and divergent pulls of competing interests. The histories of Naga Christianity and nationalism are thus intertwined, culminating in recent years in nationalists actually appropriating the religion as a banner of their cause.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

12

A Matter of Belief

Some of these divergent interests are explored in chapter 2 through the persisting pantheon of Angami beliefs and practices which now permeate the lives of both Christians and non-Christians. Comparing them with those described in J.H. Hutton’s monograph (1921a), we see the ingenuity with which Angami have adapted them to present circumstances, often in the face of opposition by both missionaries and Angami Christian converts, and against the background of variable nationalist views on the place of animism and Christianity in the independence struggle. In particular we see the close relationship between Angami religious beliefs and their ideas about the causes of disease and illness, including concepts which cut across religious boundaries and set up a discourse on moral behaviour. Beginning with the Naga view that animism thrives on action, chapter 3 gives detailed accounts of the place of these ideas in life-cycle rituals, those performed at times of illness and disease, and at an annual festival of the Angami called Sekrenyi, which combines several themes: repairing body and soul, purification, initiation to adulthood, and the well-being of the people. Moreover, in this celebration of the Sekrenyi festival, Angami customs and beliefs about their origin and migration are reinforced, thus making the festival an identity marker for the Angami as a whole and not just a parochial event. The festival is explicitly about the renewal of life and health and so, being a communal event, speaks to the participants as a whole, Christian and nonChristian, and establishes the contours of Naga self-concern that goes beyond conflicting village, clan and separatist loyalties. Traditional healers have in some cases joined the new churches while others have remained outside. Together, however, they straddle animistic continuity and the reglobalizing reach of Christian healing and biomedicine. Chapter 4 therefore enters the lives of Angami traditional healers, of whom there are various types, ranging from herbalists to diviners, all with their own methods of treatment and ways of acquiring and transmitting knowledge. Beholden to past practices alongside new methods, those who have converted to Christianity have retained the services of various possessory spirits which are regarded as vital assistants in their work. Chapter 5 asks how and why Christianity was introduced by the American Baptist Mission to Naga Hills. Material from correspondence and memoirs of the missionaries reveal their strategies of evangelization. It is then shown which aspects of Christianity attracted the Naga, how education and biomedicine came to play a vital role in the acceptance of mission activities by some Naga, and why conflicts occurred between Christian converts and non-Christians. Of particular importance is the sometimes uneasy relationship that existed between missionaries and British colonial officials and, later, the exile of American Baptist missionaries by the newly independent Government of India for expressing political sympathy with the emerging nationalist movement, itself fostered through earlier exposure of Naga British army recruits to Europe and elsewhere during the First and Second World Wars.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

13

Chapter 6 introduces a case showing how the monopoly of the Baptist Church was challenged when a Catholic mission was given permission by the Government of Independent India to enter Naga Hills in the early 1950s. Gradually other denominations, especially Revival churches, made inroads. Keeping in perspective the proliferation of different denominations among the Angami and the choices available to people, chapter 6 discusses contemporary Christianity among the Angami. I explore the reasons for conversion and for switching allegiance from one church to another. Giving a comparative account of liturgy in the churches of different denominations, I then examine the differences as well as the similarities among them with respect to the reasons people give for their faith in a particular church. In some cases church revivalism ‘indigenized’ worship by associating the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit with the pre-Christian spirit pantheon, so further complicating the divisions between Christians and non-Christians, including healers. In chapter 7 it is shown how the different healing ideas and practices of animism and Christianity, and biomedicine through Christian missions, reconcile their initial differences and come together as a plural medical system, which is used by both Christians and non-Christians and is finally accepted by the church. At the same time, Christianity is increasingly turned to as the only likely source of healing the violence resulting from the warring factions of the Naga nationalist movement. The Conclusion takes up the theme of political reconciliation through Christianity’s emphasis on healing through forgiveness. The church’s collective appeals for peace, however, come up against the recurring nationalist factional vengeance, based primarily on an opposition between those who seek only political autonomy within India and those arguing for total sovereignty. The violence moreover partly runs along the lines of rival Naga social units, ranging from tribe to village and clan, having also been experienced first at the hands of the colonial British and, later, the Indian Army opposed to secession. So while a plural healing system successfully reconciles Christianity and the traditional religion, the church has yet to heal the history of conflict between factions. A dilemma is whether its appeals for forgiveness can be unconditional or must be preceded by apology or confession in order for there to be national peace.

Notes 1. The site is now also used for other secular gatherings such as meetings of the Bamboo Development Board, and since 2009 it has a permanent museum devoted to the Second World War Battle of Kohima. See also Kikon (2005) for a critique of the Hornbill Festival. 2. See Ranger (2008) and Lumsdaine (2009) on essays exploring the link between organization of evangelical Christianity and democracy. In Fernandes’ article in this collection, the divisiveness of the Baptist church councils in north-eastern India hinders steps towards getting the insurgents to agree a common peace policy. Compare also the different responses to authority and leadership among Angami Baptists and Catholics (Peseyie 2001 and

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

14

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Orapankal 1999). See also Bautista and Khek Gee Lim (2009) on the relationship between Christianity, conversion, nationalism and the State in Asia. See also Comaroff and Comaroff (1991, 1992). 3. Personal discussion in February 2010 with Thomas Csordas, in which he agreed that the question of selectivity and agency could legitimately be included in a critique of the book. 4. In 1989, after a concerted effort by the Naga Mothers’ Association, with support from the Nagaland Baptist Church Council, the Nagaland state Government implemented prohibition on the sale of alcohol in the state. Alcoholism has been a problem in Nagaland, but prohibition has been criticized as boot-legging is now rampant. Among Christian converts some are puritanical and do not consume alcohol, but for many it is a drink that they consider they can enjoy with impunity, just like Christians in the West.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Chapter 1

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A MOUNTAINOUS STATE

We can think of social change as concurrent streams of different length, pace, volume, intensity, intersection, divergence and convergence. Viewed in this way, the pattern of a region’s history is uniquely complex, yet reducible to broad generalizations through comparison with other regions. The experiences of the Naga, and of the Angami people among the Naga, thus differ in detail from those of, say, the Mizo and their constituent sub-groups, while all share in the distinctiveness of north-east India as a contested buffer zone between India itself and Burma and China. Some common effects include the colonial, postcolonial and, for want of a better term, the ‘re-global’, as a sense of bounded community takes account of new and often reverse migratory flows between regions of the world: for instance, former colonial countries being visited by Christian missionaries from former subject areas such as the now Christianized Naga. The beginnings of Naga exposure to re-globalization can be traced most immediately to the three major events of British annexation in the nineteenth century, the Battle of Kohima during the Second World War, and the conversion of approximately 90 per cent of Naga to Christianity.1 These fit within a more general narrative of the Naga as having moved from the status of so-called ‘headhunters’ to that of Christians, alongside increasing demands for political secession from India, and shifting layers of interaction between Christian and non-Christian Naga. The history of the annexation of the Naga Hills by the British puts into perspective the conversion of the Angami (and other Naga) to Christianity, as described in chapter 6. It opens up an image of the terrain of Nagaland as a peopling of past and current struggles, ambitions and setbacks. An observer might be forgiven for thinking that Nagaland has only attracted widespread attention for its former headhunting fame and for the fact that, despite its small size and population, it is a fully fledged Indian state because it shares its eastern border with Burma (Myanmar, see maps 1.1 and 1.2) and so is part of that country’s north-eastern buffer zone. Without denying foreigners’ romanticization of Nagaland’s past, it is certainly also the case that the area’s geophysical status has been of central pragmatic importance to Nagaland and, as we shall see, of strategic significance for both the Naga and the British at different points in its development. Situated in the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, it is a mountainous state with the highest peak, Saramati, rising to

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

16

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Map 1.1 Map of India showing the location of Nagaland

Map 1.2 Map of north-east India

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

17

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

3,877 metres above sea level. The altitude gives it a salubrious temperate climate with an average rainfall of 250 centimetres. Most of the mountains in the state are covered with thick tropical rain forests. Nagaland has an area of 16,579 square kilometres with a population at the 2011 Census of 1,980,602 which includes the officially recognized sixteen Naga ethnic groups,2 Kachari, Kuki and non-Naga immigrants.3 The state is divided into eleven districts or administrative units, namely Dimapur, Kiphire, Kohima, Longleng, Mokokchung, Mon, Peren, Phek, Tuensang, Wokha and Zunheboto (see map 1.3). These districts (with the exception of Dimapur) were carved out in accordance with the predominance of particular Naga ethnic groups, and were named after their most prominent village and the administrative township that grew up around it. For example, Mokokchung district takes its name from

Map 1.3 Administrative divisions of Nagaland

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

18

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Map 1.4 Location of villages in Kohima and Phek districts

Figure 1.1 A view of Kohima town from the Aradura hill, 2011.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

19

the Ao Naga village of Mokokchung and has mostly Ao Naga villages. Similarly, Kohima district, home to the Angami and Rengma group of Naga, is named after the Angami village of Kohima (originally, Kwehima). Kohima town is the capital of Nagaland (see figure 1.1). The township came up outside Kohima village,4 when the British moved their administrative headquarters from the low-lying British post at Samaguting5 towards the end of the nineteenth century. Kohima is situated at a height of 1,444 metres above sea level, its nearest railhead and airport being seventy-five kilometres away in Dimapur town, close to the Nagaland–Assam border. The national highway number 39 connects Dimapur and Kohima towns with the neighbouring Indian states of Assam and Manipur (see map 1.4).

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Why the British Annexed the Region Before gaining the status of a state in the Federal Republic of India in 1963, Nagaland was known as the Naga Hills District, and was a part of Assam. Assam was under the rule of the Ahoms from the thirteenth century until the seventeenth century when the Burmese defeated them. In 1826 Assam was taken over by the British East India Company which had previously defeated the Burmese and also gained vast tracts of land lying between Assam and Burma with the signing of the Yandabo treaty. Having earlier had reciprocal arrangements with the Ahom kings which had temporarily precluded headhunting, the Naga now, allegedly, resumed their headhunting raids on the Assam plains during the East India Company’s rule.6 According to British colonial reports, the Angami and Zeliangrong Naga raided the Kachar area in southern Assam, while the Konyak, Phom, Ao and Lotha targeted the Sibsagar plains further north (Ghosh 1982: 85; Barpujari 1992). In the 1830s, the British East India Company began to explore the eastern borders of Assam for potential tea plantation land.7 Their first contact with the Naga was in fact an attempt to involve some Naga villages in cultivating tea. However, they failed to motivate them.8 The British secured the region by restricting entry to what was declared in official terms ‘wasteland’ (Baruah 2005: 91–95; Guha 1991; Gangopadhyay 1990). Land was given to tea plantations under the Waste Land Grant Rule of 1838. The conditions were liberal and revenue rates were very low (Gangopadhyay 1990: 134; Baruah 2005: 92). Guha writes that by 1901 tea gardens occupied nearly a quarter of the total settled area in Assam (Guha 1991: 191; Baruah 2005: 93). Carving out tea plantations restricted the movements of the local hill population to forest paths. The communities living in the ‘wasteland’ beyond the ‘frontier’, including the present-day ‘Naga’, did not have any say in this expansion. After the 1850s the presumed ‘empty tracts’ were also used for settling migrants from other parts of India who worked as seasonal labour in the tea plantations, as well as for settling the migratory groups such as the Kuki people from the neighbouring Manipur Kingdom.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

20

A Matter of Belief

From the 1840s onwards British contact with the Naga took the form of punitive expeditions into Naga Hills to deter the Naga raids on the plantations and the villages within the British administrative boundary in Assam (Ghosh 1982; Barpujari 1992). In 1879, recounting these expeditions in his report the Statistical Accounts of Naga Hills, Hunter stated: The Nagas have frequently come into collision with the British authorities, and numerous expeditions have been dispatched against them to punish their marauding inroads into our Districts. The first was in 1832, when an expedition was sent from Manipur into the Angami hills, consisting of seven hundred soldiers under the command of Captain Jenkins. A most persistent opposition to the advance of the troops was offered by the Nagas, who on this occasion made their first acquaintance with the effect of firearms, and a severe retribution was meted out to them. Other expeditions were sent in 1833 and 1838; and up to 1851 no less than ten separate expeditions had to be dispatched in order to repress these lawless savages. (1879: 181)

However in 1851, the British decided to withdraw from sending punitive expeditions into the Naga Hills due to the heavy costs involved, with the following agenda:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Hereafter we should confine ourselves to our own ground; protect it as it can and must be protected; not meddle in the feuds or fights of these savages; encourage trade with them as long as they are peaceful towards us; and rigidly exclude them from all communication either to sell what they have got, or to buy what they want, if they should become turbulent or troublesome … These are the measures, which are calculated to allay their natural fears of our aggression upon them, and to repel their aggression on our people. These will make them feel our power both to repel their attacks, and to exclude them from advantages they desire, far better, at less cost, and with more justice, than by annexing their country openly by a declaration, or virtually by a partial occupation. (Assam Administration Report, 1882–83)9

But a steady continuation of raids by the Naga on villages directly under the control of the British forced them to revoke the decision. Gradually, because of superior weapons and support from the King of the nearby state of Manipur, the British managed to gain control over some Angami Naga villages. The British strategy was to punish any village that challenged the troops by razing it to the ground, burning it and destroying its granaries (Elwin 1969; Hunter 1879, 1882; Barpujari 1986). Over the years, British interest in the Naga Hills also became twofold: firstly, to put an end to the headhunting raids by the Naga, and secondly, to explore the mountainous country in order to find a direct land route from Assam to Burma and Manipur, and explore for natural resources to increase the revenue.10 In 1867, the district of Naga Hills was formed with its headquarters at Samaguting. The writings of the nineteenth century British officers imply that the small and weak villages, which had been in constant fear of attacks from their more powerful neighbours, were the first to give in to the British forces. These small villages came under British protection in exchange for a nominal

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

21

house-tax and supplies of porters and rations (for a payment) during the tours of the officers. The more powerful villages, however, resisted the new order. The tour diaries inform us that the officers leading the expeditions were, themselves, quite wary of the intent of these villages, which had been, also, most reluctant to supply them with porters and rations (Mackenzie 1884; Butler 1871, 1875; Johnstone 1896). In 1870, on an official tour of the Angami area, Captain Butler (who was the district commissioner) mused over the possibility of shifting the headquarters from Samaguting, in the foothills, to a ‘healthier’ location near Kohima village: The face of the country here is very different from that around Samoogootung, being much more open and quite free of that dense forest jungle and thick undergrowth which causes the latter station to be so unhealthy than we are at a comparatively high elevation with five rolling mountains almost every one of which has a village on its summit and being the most populous portion of these hills, the very heart in fact of the Angamee (or Tengumah) clans I consider a well chosen spot anywhere in this vicinity (and there would be no difficulty in finding one) would be peculiarly well adopted to become the Head quarter station of the Naga Hills [sic]. (Butler 1942, cited in Cambridge Naga Videodisc 1990)

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Butler was hopeful that shifting the headquarters to Kohima would aid in keeping the dominant Angami villages under control. The following passage from his tour diary gives us an idea of his strategy: … once fix the station here and positively declare that all feuds must cease we should soon have peace and quietness where all at present is war and discord. There is a very strong party in almost every village who are anxious for peace and who would I believe gladly pay a moderate revenue (say Re.1 per house) and aid me in restoring order, the three villages of Kohimah, Khonomah and Mozemah are the only ones that are at all likely to give us any trouble and one good example made the game would be entirely in our own hands and we should be enabled to dictate our own terms. Every village as is well known is divided into clans the majority of them at feud hating each other most cordially so that a combination is almost impossible, certainly most improbable and let one policy only be a bold and decided one and I think there is little fear as to what the result will be [sic]. (Butler 1942)

However, at the same time it is evident that in spite of the interest of certain British officers like Johnstone (who was Political Agent to Manipur) to extend the administration to the Naga, the British authorities were not keen to incur any unnecessary administrative cost. The official reports state their disapproval quite clearly (see Mackenzie 1884). The Naga villages nearer the plains of Assam consistently resisted British expeditions (both survey and punitive). A passage from Hunter’s report gives us an idea of these expeditions and the nature of Naga resistance: During the progress of the Survey our parties were brought into collision with the Nagas. In February 1875, the Survey party in the eastern hills, under the charge of

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

22

A Matter of Belief

Lieutenant Holcombe, Assistant Commissioner of Jaipur, in Sibsagar, was attacked at Ninu, a Naga village about four miles from the plains. Lieutenant Holcombe and eighty of the party were killed, and Captain Badgely and fifty men wounded … The villages which were shown to have taken part in the massacre were attacked and destroyed. Nearly all the heads of the murdered men were recovered … In December 1875 only one Survey party was dispatched into the hills, under the command of Captain Butler, accompanied by a small military escort. This party, a few days after entering the hills, fell into an ambuscade near the village of Pangti, and Captain Butler was speared by a Naga concealed in the jungle through which the path lay, and died a few days afterwards. No other person was injured. The village of Pangti was destroyed next day. (Hunter 1879: 182–83)

Nevertheless, a sub-division administrative centre was opened in Wokha to exercise control over the Lotha Naga which was later, in 1878, moved to Kohima. Hunter sums up the British interest in the Naga at this stage in the following comment in the Gazette:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Our policy with regard to the Nagas has uniformly been directed to the aim of establishing political control rather than direct government … it was thought that by forming Naga Hills district a central position would be secured, from which the peaceful influences might gradually be extended over the Nagas, who have always manifested predatory instincts and rugged independence. The systematic exploration of the country was also held out as our object of scarcely secondary importance. (Hunter 1881: 15–16)

With subsequent expansion of the territory, another administrative centre was opened at Mokokchung in the Ao area in 1889. In 1910, the Konyak Naga area was annexed (Ghosh 1982). However, this political control was not easily obtained. In the beginning, only weak villages could be brought under administrative control, as they were interested in gaining political shelter and security from the British against their powerful neighbours. The punitive expeditions would burn the Naga villages that did not surrender the offenders, as this was considered the most effective way of getting their submission. B.C. Allen’s report in the Gazette about a punitive expedition against Yampong village informs us of this point of view: ‘they declined to come in and surrender or pay the fine, there was nothing for it but to fire the houses. Shortly afterwards the villagers tendered their submission, and thus afforded another instance of the good effect exercised on the Naga mind by the burning of his home’ (Allen 1905: 27). He then goes on to write that the deputy commissioner to Naga Hills was of the opinion that, ‘burning a village led almost immediately to the establishment of good relations with the inhabitants’ (ibid.). In this context it is important to note that the traditional political structure of most Naga ethnic groups was not conducive to the formation of a single united entity to fight the British. The village, or to be more precise, a segment of the village known as a khel, was the most viable and functional unit.11 It was only when the whole village was attacked by another rival village that all the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

23

khel would get together to fight the enemy. Some powerful villages – those who had a good number of warriors – had hegemony over the weaker villages, who ended up paying tributes to the former basically to safeguard their lives from the headhunting raids, which were a part of the initiation rituals of all the Naga ethnic groups. The tour diaries of the Political Officers and the reports in the Gazettes frequently recount the independent nature of the Naga, especially the Angami who resisted the expeditions. The major casualties were, as mentioned earlier, Captain Butler, officiating Political Officer to Naga Hills, killed in an ambush in 1875, and Damant, Political Officer to Naga Hills, killed in 1879 at Khonoma village.12 The following brief description of the Angami rebellion gives an idea of the resistance that was offered by the Angami to any kind of encroachment on their territory.

The Khonoma Rebellion

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A steep flight of about a hundred masonry steps leads to a small marble monument in Merhema-khel of Khonoma village, installed by the British to commemorate the officers who died at Khonoma in 1879 during the Angami uprising against the British.13 It reads: G. H. Damant MACS Killed at Khonoma 4th October 1879

Major C. R. Cock DAAG Killed at Khonoma 22nd November 1879

Submajor Nurbir SAI 44th G.R. Died at Khonoma 22nd November 1879

LT H.H. Forbes [sic] 44th G.R. Mortally wounded at Khonoma Died and buried at Sechima, 22nd November 1879

In the three decades of British expeditions, the Naga had successfully equipped themselves with firearms, which they acquired from ambushing British troops. In 1879, just a year after the headquarters had been moved to Kohima, Khonoma, a prominent Angami village twenty kilometres south of Kohima, staged a rebellion. Equipped with firearms and spears, the villagers fought against the British troops and fatally wounded Damant along with four other officers.14 The garrison at Kohima also came under the siege of the Angami. It was only when Captain Johnstone, Political Officer to Manipur, came in with more men that the rebellion was quelled. In November 1879, a month after the death of Damant, the British planned a major assault15 on Khonoma. Colonel Mackenzie recounted the attack that was carried out ‘to punish Konemah and reassert the supremacy of the British Government’:

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

24

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Konemah was attacked on the following day. The place, which was by nature very strong, had been fortified with immense labour and skill, and was deemed by the Nagas impregnable. The assault lasted all day, and at nightfall only the lower portion of the village had been captured, after the severest fighting ever known in these hills. In the night, the Nagas evacuated the upper works, and on the following day the British force occupied the position, having lost in the assault two British Officers and the Subedar-Major of the 44th S.L.L. killed, two British and two Native Officers wounded, and 44 of the rank and file killed and wounded. The Nagas retreated to a strongly fortified position on the crest of Burrail range, where, as their access to their fields and houses was cut off, the General with his small force deemed it inexpedient to follow them preferring to reduce them to terms by the slower processes of blockade. (Mackenzie 1884, cited in Elwin 1969: 187–88)

In the ensuing months, by cutting supplies to the villagers, the British managed to take over Khonoma, forcing the villagers to vacate the site and move to the lower ridges. As a punishment the village was demolished, the clans were asked to disperse and their terrace fields were confiscated for a year. This was also the period when the American Baptist Missionaries entered Naga Hills. As I shall discuss in chapter 5, their first mission was opened in Ao Naga territory that was outside the administrative boundaries of the British. In 1879 they decided to send a missionary to the Angami area, after the establishment of the British post at Kohima. But the Khonoma rebellion and siege of Kohima garrison delayed their plans. Moreover, the turbulent relationship of the Angami with the British meant that in the beginning the missionaries, being white-skinned outsiders, were thought of as having connections with the East India Company. Despite such resistance on the part of the Angami, the rebellion was thus defeated. As mentioned above, with final control exerted by the British over the Konyak Naga area in 1910, British annexation of Naga Hills was more or less complete, if uneven. Swiftly thereafter, during the first half of the twentieth century, Naga were drawn into direct and indirect participation in the two world wars. Much of the contemporary social and political situation in Nagaland has its genesis in this exposure of Naga to wider world politics. For instance, a large number of Naga (about two thousand), recruited from within the Naga Hills administrative boundaries and from what was known as ‘transfrontier’ regions, were sent as part of the French Labour Corps in 1917. They travelled together by ship and worked alongside each other clearing the roads in the battle zone. Yonuo suggests that the experience in the Labour Corps far away from their homeland would have given a sense of unity to the Naga from different groups and perhaps instilled nationalist sentiments which led to the creation of a Naga Club to promote the interests of the Naga (1974: 125–26).16 As far back as 1929, Naga, some being members of the Naga Club, had submitted a memorandum to the Simon Commission declaring their intention to be independent, which was signed by twenty educated and mostly Christian Naga, largely from the Angami community who worked for the British administration as clerks and interpreters. In 1927, the Conservative

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A Mountainous State

25

Government in Britain appointed an Indian Statutory Commission, popularly known as the Simon Commission after its Chairman, to decide the political future of India. The Simon Commission was boycotted by the Indian National Congress (INC), Muslim League and other organizations as no Indians were included in the commission which was to decide the future of India. However, the Naga residing in Naga Hills, who were not a part of the mainland Indian freedom movement, sent a letter to the Simon Commission in 1929 expressing their wish to be recognized as separate from the rest of India and sought an independent status at the end of the British rule. The argument they put forward was similar to that expressed separately by Robert Reid, who was the governor of Assam, and also by J.H. Hutton, who was a former district commissioner of the Naga Hills, that the Naga peoples were different in their customs, religion, and governance from the mainland and plains Indians (see Elwin 1961). However, there were also educated Christian Naga who were based outside the Naga Hills in Jorhat for higher studies who were supportive of the INC-led freedom movement against the British.17 A prominent person among them was Reverend Longri Ao, a charismatic Baptist evangelist, who was not allowed by the British officers to enter Naga Hills as they considered him to be a troublemaker (Rao 1986: 25). He was supportive of the Indian National Congress, but by 1947 he had changed his views and became part of Naga National Council. Around the same time in Southern Naga area, which fell under three separate British administrative divisions (Naga Hills, North Cachar Hills and Manipur), the Heraka movement was taking hold among the Rongmei, Liangmei and Zeme Naga. It combined elements of animism, Hinduism and, according to some, was anti-Christianity. Jadonang, healer and priestly head of the movement, and his niece Gaidinliu, had begun an anti-British campaign. This was directed against settlement policies which violated the traditional cycle of shifting cultivation and caused conflicts between the Kuki and Zeme.18 Jadonang was arrested by the British in 1931 and executed for allegedly indulging in human sacrifice (Yonuo 1974: xiii, 127). Jadonang and Gaidenliu’s activities were also perceived as anti-crown.19 Gaidenliu was arrested by the British and later hailed as a freedom fighter by Nehru, the first prime minister of India.20 In the run up to India’s independence in 1947, much debate took place among the prominent educated Naga leaders, mostly belonging to Angami and Ao communities.21 Previous to that in 1944, during the Second World War, a majority of Naga sided with the British to push back the Japanese. However, Angami Zapu Phizo (normally known as A.Z. Phizo or Zapu Phizo), recognized as the father of the Naga National Movement, was part of the Indian National Army (INA) led by Subhash Chandra Bose that allied with Japan against the Allied forces in return for Indian independence, and according to Naga writers, Phizo also sought an independent Naga area against what he saw as the British Occupational Army (Yonuo 1974: xiii). He was captured and jailed in Rangoon,

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

26

A Matter of Belief

Burma, by the British for his anti-British stance at the end of the war, and was released in 1946 (Ao 2002: 19 and Yonuo 1974: 199).

Naga and the World Wars While the Battle of Kohima in the Second World War was fought mainly on Angami soil in 1944, much before that in 1917, about two thousand Naga22 were sent to France as part of the Labour Corps. Balfour23 recounted his observations made in France in the foreword to the book The Sema Nagas by Hutton: In September, 1917, in Eastern France, I came across a gang of Nagas, many of them, no doubt, Mr. Hutton’s own protégés, engaged in road-repairing in the warzone, within sound of the guns. They appeared to be quite at home and unperturbed … One wonders what impressions remain with them from their sudden contact with higher civilisations at war … Now that they are back in their own hills, will they settle down to the indigenous simple life and revert to the primitive conditions which were temporarily disturbed? (Balfour 1921: xvi–xvii)

Fürer-Haimendorf was to reflect in a similar vein on the effects of the later Battle of Kohima on the Naga:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

When the Japanese invaded Burma and India during the Second World War the Naga Hills became a battleground. Soldiers of various races passed through, lived, fought and died among the Nagas. Thus new people, new weapons, new attire, new food and above all new ideas were introduced to the Nagas and when the War came to an end they could not go back to the old secluded life. (Fürer-Haimendorf 1984: 1426)

During the battle, large parts of Kohima village were destroyed in the bombings.24 One of my informants from Kohima said that after the bombings they had no food left, as all their grain had also been burnt. They were forced to move into the jungles to avoid further bombings and were given food supplies by the British.25 Although hardly at first voluntary conscripts, Angami were to provide essential help to the Allied forces; some were recruited to fight, while others provided an intelligence service to the Allies by bringing back reports of Japanese troop positions. Drawing on the Angami tradition of installing stone memorials for the ancestors, a monolith was erected at the Commonwealth cemetery in the heart of Kohima town a few months after the battle as a memorial to those who died (Swinson 1966: 254–55). In a similar vein and somewhat ironically given the coerced nature of Naga recruitment, in 1945 after the battle, Charles Pawsey, the then deputy commissioner for Naga Hills, formed the Naga Hills District Tribal Council (NHDTC) to bring the Naga people together for the postwar reconstruction programme (Ghosh 1982; Singh 1972; see also Hutton 1945).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

27

A consequence of the Second World War was indeed to help Naga form a united political front. Within a year the NHDTC acquired political overtones and changed its name to the Naga National Council (NNC) (Singh 1972: 89), whose leader was Angami Zapu Phizo from Khonoma village. This was a more consolidated form of the Naga Club, which had been formed way back in 1919 by a group of Naga who had returned after serving in the Labour Corps in France together with those Naga who were employed as government officers and interpreters, or dobashi.26 The formation of the NNC was a watershed event since this was the first time that Naga from different groups had come together with an agenda. However, this coming together was not devoid of old prejudices and fears, and soon the group found its members divided over the issue of secession from India. In her diaries, Mildred Archer (1947) refers to the anxieties of different Naga communities.27 According to her, the Ao Naga leaders were cautious of supporting the demand for secession from India, as they feared that an independent Nagaland would be under the hegemony of Angami Naga.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Growth of Contemporary Politics As a result of such sub-group disagreements, the movement for secession from India inevitably involved increasingly armed factions, so that, by the turn of the twenty-first century and for some years beforehand, Nagaland was considered to be a politically turbulent state. Being out of bounds to foreigners until recently, even Indian citizens require an Inner Line Permit to enter the area.28 However, this ‘inner line’ regulation is not new. As records show, it was first introduced in 1873, under the name of Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, to keep a check on the movement of British officers and people from the plains of Assam into the Naga Hills. It was also deployed to curtail the usurpation of land by entrepreneurs during the nineteenth century ‘tea rush’ in Assam in the area bordering a loosely demarcated territory known as Naga Hills district (Baruah 2005: 92–93). The inner line was repeatedly extended in the years 1884, 1928, 1929, and 1934, supposedly to keep the Naga Hills from being exploited by traders and moneylenders (Singh 1994: 9). After the independence of India, the inner line was retained initially at the behest of Naga leaders, but since 1959 it has been in force due to the insurgency movement. By the late 1940s, the Naga had organized themselves into a movement that resisted the inclusion of Naga Hills in independent India. After long negotiations between the rebel Naga group, Naga National Council (NNC) and the Government of India, the state of Nagaland was carved out of Assam in 1963. Present day Nagaland comprises the erstwhile Naga Hills and Tuensang Area, which included parts of unadministered territory that lay between the Naga Hills district and Burma during the British rule.29 A special policy was formulated for the north-eastern ‘tribal’ areas bordering China and Burma.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

28

A Matter of Belief

Verrier Elwin, in the capacity of advisor to the prime minister of India, drafted a special document, which was published under the title, A Philosophy for NEFA (1959).30 The special constitutional safeguards granted to some of the northeastern states are largely based on the recommendations made by Elwin. In 1962, the Thirteenth Amendment Act of the Constitution of India was passed in an effort to give more autonomy to the Naga. Under the act, Nagaland has special safeguards, which cannot be withdrawn unless the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland decides to pass a resolution against them. These are with respect to:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

(1) Religious or social practices of the Naga; (2) Naga customary law and procedure; (3) The administration of civil and criminal justice involving decisions according to Naga customary law; (4) The ownership and transfer of land and its natural resources. (Singh 1995: 101) With these constitutional safeguards, the Naga are in a privileged position, as they have private ownership of the land, forest and water resources, unlike in the rest of India where water and forest resources are owned by the government. These safeguards are current even now; Indians from other states are not allowed to buy land or own businesses in Nagaland. Customary law is practised at the village level, although homicide matters are now largely dealt with under the Indian Penal Code. The formation of the state has not, however, settled the issues that were at the heart of the political movement for secession from India.31 As the Naga ethnic groups are spread over a larger geographical area than that constituted by the present boundaries of Nagaland state, with constant border disputes with the neighbouring state of Assam, there have been demands for a ‘Greater Nagaland’.32 In 1969–70, the map of Nagaland was not printed in the State Gazetteer because of the ongoing negotiations concerning the state boundaries at the time; the border dispute has remained unresolved, and it is still a principal item on the agenda of the Naga movement.33 With the formation of the Nagaland state and its first assembly elections in 1964, new political parties were formed with diverse views on the desirable relationship of Nagaland with India. As a consequence, today there are several different political parties.34 The new political process has also created fissiparous tendencies, dividing people along party lines, with each party adhering to different aims with regard to the political status of Nagaland.35 The moderates believe in more autonomy within the Union of India, while the extremists favour secession and independence. Although Nagaland is governed in the same way as the other states of the Indian union – it has a legislative assembly constituting elected representatives – it is common knowledge that three parallel underground governments run by three nationalists groups also exist in Nagaland.36

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

29

A Dynamic Heterogeneity

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Naga in General So far the political course of Nagaland has been described as largely one of external impingement on the Naga people without regard for their inner heterogeneity. The Naga in fact constitute a sociocultural and linguistic mosaic of sub-groups which, while often reinforced under British rule, was and still is a process of self-appellation and identification among the Naga themselves. It is in fact a self-recognized internal differentiation which has continued to play a crucial role in the continuing evolution of the Naga polity. ‘Naga’ is actually a blanket term under which are grouped several ethnic hill communities of north-east India. Like their neighbouring communities in the surrounding states of Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Assam, the Naga also speak Tibeto-Burman languages and physically resemble South-East Asian peoples.37 There are more than twenty different, self-recognized Naga communities who inhabit Nagaland, parts of Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, as well as areas across the border in Burma. Besides the officially recognized sixteen Naga ethnic groups in Nagaland mentioned above, there are four more – Tangkhul, Mao, Maram and Kabui – who live in Manipur. Some unofficial sources put the number at around thirty communities (see Yonuo 1974 and IWGIA 1986), which besides counting the bigger groups, such as Tangsa, Singhpo, Wancho and Nocte of Arunachal Pradesh, also recognizes several smaller sub-groups within Nagaland as separate Naga ethnic groups. A recent publication of documents compiled by the research department of the Council of Naga Baptist Churches published under the aegis of the Northeast Research Centre gives the number of Naga groups as sixty-five, which includes many so-called Naga groups from across the border in Burma.38 In the Indian Constitution, Naga have been placed under the category of Scheduled Tribes and have special rights to affirmative action. The definite origin of the term ‘Naga’ is not known. Most explanations are conjectural: some consider the term was derived from the Sanskrit nag, . meaning mountain (Hutton 1921a: 5 n. 1); or nangta meaning naked, or from the Ao nok, meaning a warrior (Peal 1894: 14; Elwin 1961: 4). Hutton suggests that nok itself is perhaps derived from the Hindi log, meaning people (Hutton 1921a: 5 n. 1). The Naga themselves never had a common term for the different communities who occupied the hilly tracts. However, today the name Naga is used as a superordinate identity, qualified by the individual name of the ethnic group, for example, Angami Naga, Ao Naga, Phom Naga and Konyak Naga. It serves the purpose of asserting their collective ethnic identity, and of differentiating them from the neighbouring hill communities. Historically, the oldest documents which mention contact with the Naga are the records (known as burunjia) of the Ahom kings, who ruled over Assam from the thirteenth century onwards. According to historians these records

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

30

A Matter of Belief

identify the Naga by the Assamese names for their villages rather than by their community names. They also indicate that the Naga villages bordering Assam were given cultivable land in the plains in exchange for their services to the Ahom, and also to keep their headhunting raids in check (Barpujari 1992; Bhuyan 1985; Ghosh 1982). As for Naga oral tradition, the Angami say that some Angami Naga had joined the Ahom army (Sanyü 1996: 55; Hutton 1921a: 13). The Konyak Naga of northern Nagaland have legends of interaction with Ahom kings that mention marriage of a Naga girl with an Ahom King who was living in exile among them (Hutton 1921a: 384–85). Hutton (1965: 17) mentioned that Ptolemny in his Geographia II of the second century AD referred to naked people who occupied roughly the same geographical area as the present day Naga peoples. This has been taken up by the Naga authors and nationalists to affirm the indigenous status of the Naga groups. Claims that the Naga could be the Kirata, a golden bodied people, who are mentioned in the Hindu religious texts such as the Vedas, Smritis and Mahabharata have been made by Chatterji (Chatterji 1951; see also Elwin 1961: 1–3). However, the legends of origin and migration of different Naga ethnic groups point towards their having reached their present habitat in several waves of migration.39 Several Naga groups, for example the Angami, Lotha, Sumi (formerly known as Sema), Chakhesang and Rengma, share a common legend of origin: their ancestor, Koza, is said to have come from the south. Others, like the Ao, Sangtam, Yimchungrü, Phom, Chang and Khiamniungan of north and north-west Nagaland, believe that they migrated to the present habitat from the north-east. The Ao and Sangtam, in addition, share their myth of origin, which says that their ancestors emerged from the six sacred stones or Longtrok at Chongliyimti, a Sangtam Naga village. A common theme in the various tales of migration is their emergence from the mouth of a cave or an opening in the earth. But migration stories have also been a subject of controversy.40 In nationalist narratives, emphasis is often on passage in ancient times from Mongolia to the present location.41 Angami in Particular Self-recognized differentiation goes beyond the Naga as a whole and their constituent groups. Bearing in mind that these groups do not always share a mutually intelligible dialect, despite overall Naga linguistic closeness, internal differentiation continues in ever more detail within each group. To take a prime example, Angami are the dominant ethnic group in the district of Kohima and are the second largest ‘ethnic’ group in Nagaland. Separate population figures for different ethnic communities are available only until the 1971 Census, which gave the Angami population as 68,552. The name ‘Angami’ is said to derive from Tenyimia, a term Angami use for themselves. However, the term Tenyimia is also used collectively to refer to five Naga ethnic groups – Angami, Chakhesang, Rengma, Zeliangrong and Mao –

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

31

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

who speak dialects of the Tenyidie language. It is also claimed that the term ‘Angami’ is a modification of Gnamei, the Manipuri name for the group (Hutton 1921a: 14). According to Sanyü, Angami derives from gami, meaning ‘invaders’, a term supposedly used by the Zeme Naga for their Angami neighbours. However, he adds that some Angami groups do not accept this explanation (Sanyü 1996: 59). The appellation ‘Angami’ was apparently first used by nonNaga outsiders (Hutton 1921a: 14). The term ‘Angami’ is nowadays accepted as the group’s name, and is often used as a surname to the given first name. Angami, then, recognize internal groupings based on dialectical and some ritual practice differences. Hutton (1921a: 15) had recognized five groups on the basis of linguistic and material cultural differences, naming each group after its most prominent village as: Khonoma, Kohima, Chakroma, Viswema or Dzünokehena, Chakrima and Kezama or Eastern Angami. He labelled the first four as Western Angami. However, the Angami nowadays recognize slightly different groupings based on dialectical variation in which the dominant villages along with their satellite villages (they have ritual obligations to each other) are grouped together. The Kohima group is now known as Northern Angami, the Khonoma group as Western Angami, the Chakroma as before, the Eastern Angami as a separate ethnic group known as Chakhesang comprising Chakhri, Kheza and Sangtam sub-groups, and the Viswema group are put under the category Southern Angami. We may tabulate the divisions as follows: Divisions proposed by Hutton

Contemporary Angami divisions

Khonoma group (W.A)* Kohima group (W.A.) Chakroma (W.A.) Viswema or Dzünokehena (W.A.) Chakrima Kezama or Eastern Angami

Western Angami Northern Angami Chakro Southern Angami Chakhesang Naga Chakhesang Naga

*(W.A. = Western Angami)

According to Das (1993), the Viswema group prefers to call itself Zonuokeyhonuo. In addition to the variation in dialects among these major Angami groups, there are also village-wise dialectical variations within a given group. Other variations are according to the celebratory level of certain rituals, such as Thekreni, concerned with transplanting paddy, which is most elaborately celebrated among the Western group, especially in Khonoma and Mezoma villages. In his monograph, Hutton (1921a) implies that the Khonoma village group is ‘Angami par excellence’. However, this view has been questioned by Angami to whom I have spoken from other villages. Given local variations among Angami, they say that to label one group’s ‘culture’ as representative of the whole community is incorrect and undermines village differences.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

32

A Matter of Belief

Settling on Where People Come From

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharing and differentiation also characterize stories of origin and migration, with Angami having similar legends to those of certain other Naga groups, as noted above. Two such legends point to an origin and migration from a southeasterly direction. In one story the ancestors of Angami and other neighbouring Naga groups came out of the bowels of the earth at some place near Makhel in Manipur state, south of Nagaland (Hutton 1921a: 6–7; Kabui 1996: 12). Another puts the location near the legendary stone at Khezakenoma, and in fact Khezakenoma and Chajouba villages in the district of Phek are taken as the points of dispersal of various Naga groups founded by descendants of the ancestor. The legend of origin and dispersal from the Khezakenoma legendary stone is well known among the southern Naga groups.42 The stone known as Tso Tawo is situated in Khezakenoma, a Chakhesang village located south-west of Kohima. It is a flat rock, broken into pieces which are raised on stone piles to form a sitting platform (see figure 1.2). According to legend, the stone had the magical property of doubling anything which was placed on it and was used by Koza, the ancestor, for drying paddy. One day the three sons of Koza started arguing over whose turn it was to spread paddy on the stone. To end the argument their parents decided to destroy the stone by performing the ritual of breaking eggs over it and then set it on fire using thatch.43 With a loud noise the stone cracked and the spirit of the stone, with its magical property, went up into the sky with the smoke. The same legend also relates that the three

Figure 1.2 The mythical stone Tso Tawo at Khezakenoma village, 1991.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

33

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 1.3 Tso Tawo was cordoned off in 1997. The present masonry wall was sponsored by the department of art and culture, Nagaland, under the ‘Heritage Conservation and Protection’ scheme. Khezakenoma, 2011.

brothers who went their separate ways later became the ancestors of three southern Naga groups: the Angami, Sumi and Lotha. Unlike the other stones associated with some legends,44 the Khezakenoma stone was not out of bounds for use, and was used as a sitting place by the villagers when I visited the village in January 1991. However, since then, the stone has been cordoned off by building a masonry wall around it in an effort to preserve Tenyimia people’s cultural heritage (figure 1.3).45 Khezakenoma is thus considered the first village to be founded by the ancestors of the Angami. This position is also reflected in the process of fixing dates for the annual rituals. The priest of Khezakenoma is the first to announce the dates of annual festivals, such as Sekrenyi, followed by other Chakhesang and Angami villages that announce their dates later. Thus the village founded by the ancestor is the first to celebrate any ritual, followed by villages that were founded later. Moreover, oral history of Angami village formation tells us that men from southern Angami villages moved further west and north to establish new villages.46 The other legend of migration identifies an old pear tree known as Chitebo, on the outskirts of Upper Chajouba village, as the point of dispersal of the ancestors of five Naga communities, namely, Angami, Lotha, Rengma, Chakhesang and Sumi, who inhabit southern and central Nagaland.47 The Chitebo tree stands inside a low-walled stone enclosure. A stone tablet installed near the tree in 1930 bears an inscription in English, which gives the gist of the migratory legend, relating also the significance of a broken branch

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

34

A Matter of Belief

or of the growth of a new one.48 While the former portends death in large numbers, the latter signifies increase in the population of the Naga communities who live in the same direction indicated by the branch. The tree is a symbol of (ancestral) unity for the Tenyimia, and since 1995 it has been incorporated in the emblem of Tenyimia Union.49

Organization

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Segmentary Social Organization? While it might be tempting to regard the Naga as simply made up of ever smaller internal levels of differentiation, there is something of a nesting quality in the relationship of some of the smaller groups to larger ones. While Naga social organization may not quite conform to the classical segmentary lineage model of the Nuer as proposed by Evans-Pritchard (1940) and often denounced since, an individual Naga unambiguously belongs, and is regarded by other Naga as belonging, first to his sub-clan, then to his clan, after that to his village and then to his ethnic group, such as Angami. Even today, this segmentation is observed and is most explicit at the time of state elections. What is perhaps remarkable is how these internal divisions of the Angami, and also their age-set system, have remained relatively unaltered in broad outline despite the changes that conversion to Christianity and education have brought in their wake. Let me show this persistence through analysis of the terms to describe corporate entities as used by the Angami themselves. My aim is to show that the strength of such ‘traditional’ units does more than provide a kind of cultural resistance to the external factors of colonialism, postcolonialism and re-globalization, including world Christianity and the internationalization of economy and identity. Naga segmentation also plays a role in shaping the effects of such external processes on local populations, even to the extent in some cases of offering alternative routes to accommodation. Moiety (kelhu): Persisting Halves In terms of the inheritance of property, co-residence, titles and naming, the Angami are patrilineal, tracing descent from their male ancestor Koza. They recognize the division of their group into two moieties, or kelhu: Thevo and Thekrü,50 or Thevo and Thepa (as called among the southern Angami villages).51 Thevo is considered to be the elder of the two moieties according to a variation of the legend of Koza, which says that Angami are descendants of two brothers who came out of a hole in the earth at either Khezakenoma or Makhel in Manipur (Mills 1922: 3; Hutton 1921a: 6; Sanyü 1996: 68; Kabui 1996: 12).52 The moieties are initially distinguished from each other on the basis of kinship terms used by them for mother and father. Members of Thevo moiety

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

35

use the terms apou for father and azou for mother, while those of Thekrü moiety use apfu and apfü for father and mother respectively.53 Thus it is common to find members of the same village, but belonging to different moiety (and also khel), calling their parents by different kin terms, giving rise to situations where different terms are used by a woman and her children for addressing their respective parents. In rituals, the priest or eldest person of the Thevo moiety performs the rites first. At the founding of a village, members of both moieties should be present and, ideally, at least three clans should participate. Every Angami village has at least one clan which belongs to the Thevo moiety; for example, in Khonoma village, out of the three khel Thevoma khel belongs to Thevo, while Semoma and Merhema belong to the Thekrü moiety. The village priest or kemovo (or zhevo) is generally from the founding Thevo clan among the Southern Angami; however, in other groups the office of the priest may be occupied by a suitable person regardless of moiety affiliations. In communal rituals, both moieties participate with, again, the priest or eldest man from Thevoma initiating the rite.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Clans and Sub-clans or Lineages The moieties are divided into several clans or thino, which are further divided into sub-clans or putsano. The clans are generally named after the male founder or the name is derived from legends associated with the founder. For example, Merhema clan of Khonoma was founded by a person called Meru; similarly, the Vakha sub-clan is named after its founder Vakha; and Tsütsu founded the Tsütsunoma clan of Kohima. Interestingly the clan name literally means ‘descendants of cucumber’ (tsütsu ‘cucumber’). According to legend, a woman from Kohima village gave birth to an illegitimate child whose father was from the Semoma thino of Khonoma village. She gave birth to the child in her field and carried it back to the village hidden under a cloth. When she was asked what she was carrying, she replied, ‘a cucumber’. The child was thus nicknamed Tsütsu and the clan he established came to be known as the ‘cucumber clan’ or Tsütsunoma thino. I was told that Tsütsunoma thino of Kohima and Semoma thino of Khonoma are ‘one and the same’ or kin, as the father of Tsütsu was from Semoma thino. As well as legends explaining the naming of a thino, one also comes across some that explain the reasons behind having a certain number of thino in a village. In Kidima village I saw four boulders that were lying covered with thorny twigs in a barbed-wire enclosure at the main meeting place (thehu-ba: thehu ‘meeting’, ba ‘to sit’). I was told that these were sacred stones, hence out of bounds. Legend further has it that when the village was founded a rock fell down from the sky and broke into four pieces – the four thino in the village are said to be a consequence of this event. The thino are spatially segregated in the village – each with its more or less defined boundary. Thino divisions are now popularly known as khel, the term

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

36

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

being used quite often when talking of one’s thino in the spatial or territorial sense of the term. I will be using the term khel instead of thino in the following chapters, as it has become part of the common vocabulary of the Angami (as well as other Naga groups). Normally a khel is predominantly made up of a single lineage and in the past these thino were exogamous. Nowadays, with an increase in the sub-divisions of thino, there are cases of marriages taking place within a thino. In the last few decades the thino in several villages have installed genealogy stones at their main meeting places. Known as nuo-lhou-dze-kitsü (nuo ‘children’, lhou ‘life’, dze54 ‘to live’, kitsü ‘stone’), these tablets trace the genealogy to the founders of the village (see figure 1.4). There are also separate smaller genealogy stones for the different sub-clans. In the past two decades stone tablets with names of those who died in the Naga nationalist movement have also been erected in villages of Khonoma and Jotsoma (see figure 1.5). In the past, a thino/khel was the most salient functional unit. Historically, one finds that the British political agents witnessed intense rivalry between khel of the same village (Davis 1891: 337; Elwin 1969: 548). The khel boundaries were well fenced with thorny bushes. Wooden gates (kharu) normally hewn out of a single plank of wood were the entry and exit points. These gates were (and are) carved with symbols that, besides signifying good luck, also depicted the number of warriors in the khel and number of heads taken by them (see figure 1.6). Nowadays the gates have only symbolic meaning in the sense of reminding people of their past significance, and their replacement in this form

Figure 1.4 Two elderly members of Meru clan sitting near the memorial stone, Merhema-khel, Khonoma village, 1991.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

37

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 1.5 Aselie standing next to the martyrs’ memorial for the members of NNC in Merhema-khel, Khonoma village, 1995.

Figure 1.6 Kharu (gate) at the mission compound entrance to T-khel of Kohima village. This gate was installed in 1947.This wooden kharu depicts symbols of fertility and valour, 2011.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

38

A Matter of Belief

has become less common due to conversion of most khel members to Christianity. That said, villages like Khonoma and Kigwema have come up with a novel idea of replacing the wooden gates with ones carved out of stone, and such innovations by villages within a traditional frame point up the continuing strength of these primary units of residence.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Villages at the Core The Angami word for village is rüna; and the term rüna-mia, (literally, ‘villageperson’) means inhabitant of a particular village. The village names always end with the suffix -ma, for example: Kigwe-ma, Viswe-ma, Khono-ma, Mezo-ma and so on. The suffix -ma is, however, distinct from the word -mia. A majority of Angami villages are built on the spur of a hill near a source of water, although in the last few decades some Angami and other Naga (especially Sumi) villages have been established around Dimapur town, in the plains of Nagaland. In the past the altitude had strategic importance in providing a defensive view. The villages had lookout places and were surrounded by stockades. Ditches, dug around the village as well as the khel, were filled with sharp bamboo spikes, which were also strewn along the jungle paths between two warring villages – a Naga version of modern land mines. Tour diaries of British deputy commissioners and anthropologists are full of graphic descriptions of them (for examples, see Butler 1942; Elwin 1969: 52; Hutton 1929; Fürer-Haimendorf 1939, 1976: 129–31). Today often only vestiges of the old stockades and lookout places remain. However, during my first visit to Jotsoma village, I was quite surprised to find that a ‘right-angled’ gate whose photograph is published in Hutton (1921a: 79) had remained intact. In several Angami villages the masonry lookout places and fortified watchtowers (kuda ‘fort’), have survived, albeit now used for sitting. Approach to the villages is along winding roads. Although most major roads are now metalled, the more remote, interior villages are reachable only by mud roads. Some villages, like Khonoma, are strategically located, not becoming visible until the last bend in the mountain road when it is then seen nestling on the shoulder of the mountain. The hill slopes surrounding Angami villages are engineered into terrace fields (see figure 1.7). Where the terrace fields end, the forests begin, with clearings for slash-and-burn (or jhum) cultivation. Thick bamboo groves grow near the villages, especially close to the entrances to the villages and the khel. A feature of Angami villages (as well as of some other Naga groups, especially Mao and Chakhesang), that catches the eye of even a casual visitor, is the rows of large stones along the village path. These installations encouraged the early ethnographers to label the Naga as people with a megalithic culture (see Hutton 1922, 1926). These stones were installed either to commemorate completion of a series of feasts of merit or in the memory of an ancestor. Several such stones line the paths outside the village leading to the fields and the main road.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

39

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 1.7 A view of Kigwema village from the national highway NH39, with terrace fields in the foreground, 1997.

In some villages one can see stones within the khel boundary and also in the middle of the terrace fields. Although revered, often one finds bundles of firewood resting against them, and if the stones in the terrace field happen to be close to the stream or main irrigation channel, it is not uncommon to see washing being spread on them to dry in the sun. Other characteristic features of Angami villages are the kharu and the sittingout places called thehu-ba (literally, ‘meeting-place’) made of big slabs of stones arranged in a wide circle. The kharu, as mentioned earlier, have symbols of valour and prosperity carved on them.55 We shall see in the chapter on ritual that these gates, besides defining the boundary of the clan units and of the village, have a sacred status that has continued. The sitting-out places or thehu-ba are located adjacent to the men’s house or kichüki, where the young boys used to undergo socialization in the past. Most of these have been now converted to youth clubs that are used by the boys and girls of the khel. Although in earlier days the khel were demarcated clearly, nowadays it is not easy to see where one khel ends and the next begins. The houses in the village are constructed in a parallel row, facing each other where there is a flat stretch of land; otherwise, and more commonly, the houses are irregularly placed with narrow masonry stairs and mud paths connecting them to the main path that runs through the village. The traditional houses are made from large planks of wood that last for generations, the walls are of wattle and daub (bamboo plastered with mud) and the roof is either made of thatch or corrugated iron sheets. Corrugated iron sheets have become popular since their use in the post Second World War reconstruction work in those Naga villages which were

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

40

A Matter of Belief

damaged by the bombings. These are now preferred over thatch, which is quick to catch fire in the dry and windy season. Today the village landscape is dominated by sloping ‘tin’ roofs and, in the case of villages which are close to the townships, modern masonry houses. Church buildings occupy the most prominent place. While much of the foregoing notes the changes that dwellings and their arrangement have undergone, persisting traces remain. This relational persistence is even more pronounced in the pattern of village naming, which provides an essence to village identity either by continuing with their old names, or by renaming villages for various reasons, or by judiciously naming new ones. The diversity of possible names is drawn from the fact that Angami villages, for example, are either named after the founder or are derived from legendary incidents or named after a particular geographical or natural feature. Thus, the village of Viswema was named after its founder Viswe, while the villages of Kigwema and Mima were named after legendary incidents. The name Kigwema literally means ‘village of those who stayed back in the houses’. Kigwema village was originally located a small distance away from its present site. The old Kigwema was called Seiterhaphe, literally ‘village with plenty of wood and forests’ (sei ‘wood’, terha ‘forest’). From this village several waves of migration took place that led to the founding of about twenty new villages, and those who stayed close to the original site renamed the village ‘Kigwema’. The Jakhama Assam Rifle Camp now occupies the old village site. One of my informants claimed that some of the new villages that were founded then are now recognized as belonging to the Chakhesang and Sumi Naga ethnic groups. Villages such as Khonoma and Jotsoma which were founded by men from Kigwema, take their names from the kinds of plant that were abundant at the new village site. Names of the villages may be changed if they are considered unsuitable or if for some reason the village shifts from its original site. In the mid-1980s the village of Rükhroma changed its name to Rüsoma. Over time the earlier name developed a negative connotation, for it contained the adverb pe-khro, meaning ‘below’ or ‘down’ (also meaning ‘south’). The villagers replaced it with pe-so, meaning ‘above’ (and also ‘north’), so giving it the positive connotation of ‘those who live above’. Similarly Zhadima village, which was founded by people who originally came from Kigwema, was initially named Lierüzou after the rice plants in the fields that would grow strong, but give very low yield. However the village was shifted to the present site to dispel the bad luck in cultivation, and was renamed Kerüma. In 1991, when I visited the village, I was told that the village committee had decided to change the name once again, this time to Zhadima, after Zhadi the founder of the village. With villages generally autonomous of each other, and despite the capacity of larger ones sometimes to dominate and absorb smaller ones, their overall relationship to each other is egalitarian and without fixed rank. By contrast the age-set system, being based on ascription by generation, provides a set hierarchy of status and authority, and yet is able also to reinforce some of this

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

41

egalitarianism by cutting across clans and sub-clans, and even different religious memberships. Within a thino, the members are organized into age-sets known as kra-mia or pelie-kro; the southern and western Angami villages use the term kra-mia, while the northern villages use pelie-kro. Each age-set covers about two to five years, with the first one beginning from the age of thirteen; at any given time there are as many as fourteen age-sets in a khel. A list of the age-sets (with a rough age grouping) from Merhema-khel of Khonoma village illustrates this:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Dierhe: 13–15 yrs Dolhuni: 16–19 yrs Kievi: 20–22 yrs Dovihu: 23–25 yrs Aniu: 26–29 yrs

Lasieu: 30–34 yrs Neisalie: 34–38 yrs Miakonyü: 38–41 yrs Kuolieu: 42–49 yrs Gokie: 50–55 yrs

Ngabi: 56–62 yrs Vilarhito: 63–67 yrs Nidou: 68–73 yrs Nigwelie: 74–79 yrs Zevicha: 80–85 yrs

For an Angami, membership of an age-set is for life.56 Traditionally, induction into the age-set was held at the time of the seasonal ceremony called Sekrenyi. It is not uncommon to hear references being made to one’s age-set peers as u-kra-mia or u-pelie-mia, meaning ‘my age-set’. People from different religions may belong to the same age-set. The age-sets are named after a patron who provides them with a room in his house. Generally the first room, which is large and spacious with wooden planks placed along the walls for sleeping or sitting on, becomes the age-set house or ki-kra-mia (or pelieyie). It is used by young men for conducting ageset meetings and for sleeping. During Sekrenyi celebrations, in some villages like Khonoma and Mezoma, the room is decorated with giant replicas of men and women’s ceremonial ornaments made by the members of the ki-kra-mia using wood, pith and wild fruits. The patron of the ki-kra-mia is someone who is socially accomplished and has various qualities and characteristics. He should be wealthy and have given feasts of merit; not have any disability; not have had any misfortune or a death in his house in the year preceding his selection; and not have transgressed any taboo. The significance of these requirements is regarded as straightforward: the qualities of the patron would pass on to the kra-mia, which in turn would prosper. Every age-set is directed by its older members or thesü-rüka (thesü ‘agegroup’, rüka ‘older’); members of the higher age-sets also help in giving directions to the younger age-sets. Each age-set has a committee, which decides on its activities. Festivals, especially community work required during the festivities, are the occasions on which the age-set system becomes visible in a khel. Meetings are held in the age-set house to decide dates for community work. During labour-intensive tasks, such as the weeding and transplantation of paddy, younger age-sets work in the fields for a nominal payment. The earnings of the age-set are used in various ways: they may be saved over several years to

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

42

A Matter of Belief

buy a plot of land for cultivation; or spent on repairs of the age-set house in the village; or used to build age-set field huts (thesü-ki) and rain shelters along the paths to the fields. During festivals the members of the age-set clean khel ponds, clear the paths in the khel and leading to the fields, and are active in cooking and serving food at communal feasts that take place in their khel. Agesets are intrinsic to the functioning of a khel, and the institution has continued among the Angami. While the junior age-sets provide the labour for various communal events, the senior ones are concerned with the governance of the khel.57 From the older age-sets are selected the pehchu-mia (or phichü-mia) or ‘elder men’, who constitute the council (kehu) of older men headed by a rüna-pe-u (or phichü-u, ‘village elder’). Each khel also has a gaobura, literally ‘village elder’. The offices of gaobura and dobashi (or interpreter) were introduced by the British to bring some uniformity to the village political structure and facilitate the governance of villages belonging to different Naga groups. The gaobura were responsible for the collection of house tax from the villagers and for supplying porters and rations at a nominal cost whenever British officers toured their region, while the dobashi worked as interpreters to help in translations during arbitration by British administrators. These offices have continued to exist. A gaobura or ‘GB’ (as the office is popularly known) is selected for life and, as the head of the village, he helps the village council of elders to settle disputes. The custom of the gaobura and dobashi wearing red woollen cloth and a red waistcoat was introduced by the British to signify their official status; it has continued to this day. Besides them, a village has an officially appointed village committee comprising a chairperson, a vice-chairperson and a group of members representing each khel, who are all responsible for the development of the village using the funds given to them by the state government. In villages close to Kohima town, each khel has a women’s group, which is involved in various welfare activities including, in recent years, campaigns against drug addiction and alcohol abuse.58 Women from each khel are also represented in the women’s wing of the Village Development Board, which is responsible for the money set aside for women’s welfare schemes. Women’s councils also arbitrate on minor disputes between women.

A Remarkable Linguistic Diversity The striking heterogeneity of customary practices, cross-cut by significant continuities, so far described among the Naga is paralleled by that of language. Mutual intelligibility is by no means evenly distributed. Some groups are able to communicate with each other more easily than others, so affecting the ways they collaborate, or do not collaborate, in other fields of activity. A capacity for wider communication exists however. The official language of the state of Nagaland is in fact English, but the common language used by

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

43

different Naga groups is the lingua franca, Nagamese: a mixture of Hindi and Assamese. While each recognized Naga ethnic group is identified with its own language, there is dialectical variation between villages or clusters of villages. Indeed, according to Matisoff (1991, 1999), there are nearly ninety Naga languages and/or dialects. Hutton also recounts the presence of a large number of dialects which he had encountered during his tenure as the district commissioner of Naga Hills, prompting him to remark:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

There is no part of the world with so much linguistic variation in so small an area. The result of the isolation of village communities, living entirely independently and often with almost entirely self contained economics, cut off from their neighbours by forest, mountain, and river, has led to the development of some thirty different languages, as different as those of different nations of Europe, in an area the size of Wales and that without taking account of dialects often so different in neighbouring villages of the same tribes as to make mutual understanding difficult. (Hutton 1965: 19)

These Naga languages, including Angami, have been placed in the TibetoBurman family and classified under Kamarupan as the Naga group of languages (Grierson 1903; Benedict 1972; Matisoff 1978, 1991: 480–81, 1999). George van Driem lists twenty-eight sub-groups in an article on Naga language groups within the Tibeto- Burman language family. He applies the metaphor of ‘fallen leaves’ to the distribution of the language sub-groups from inner China, northeast India to Tibet and Nepal, which implies the existence of a tree that is not visible now (van Driem 2008: 312). Angami, along with other Naga languages, did not have a script until the American Baptist missionaries introduced the Roman version in the nineteenth century in order to translate the gospel and write primers in native languages. Naga are well aware of the difference in this respect between written IndoEuropean tongues such as Hindi, and their own unwritten indigenous dialects. The difference is sometimes seen as simply one of bad luck for, according to a legend among some Naga groups, the plainsman had his script written on stone or paper, while the Naga script was written on a hide; but the hide got eaten by a dog and ever since the script has been lost (Hutton 1921a: 291). That said, it is the very diversity of the Naga languages that has put into perspective the special circumstances of a people conscious of themselves as a singular political grouping aiming for secession and even independence from India, and yet internally differentiated by identities partly shaped by communicative unevenness. We see something of this fractional composition of Naga identity when we consider the Angami. Like other members of the Tibeto-Burman family, Angami is a tonal language, with five tones.59 In the book on Angami grammar,60 Giridhar describes it as a ‘non-restrictive tone language’ in which ‘tones are assigned to syllables on a relatively free basis and are not constrained by any overall tone pattern in the word’; ‘Pitch distinctions, which are an integral part of the syllable, are lexically significant’ (1980: 5).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

44

A Matter of Belief

Although there is some village-wise variation, three main dialects of Angami are recognized: Western Angami, which is spoken in Khonoma and neighbouring villages; Northern Angami, spoken in Kohima and villages north of Kohima; and Southern Angami, spoken in Viswema, Kigwema and neighbouring villages that are closer to the Chakhesang and Mao Naga villages. In Northern and Western dialects, besides some differences in vocabulary, there are also variations in pronunciation of the same words. The Southern Angami dialect is closer to the Chakri language spoken in some Chakhesang villages. In the last couple of decades an effort has been made to develop a standardized Angami language called Tenyidie.61 The name derives from Tenyimia, a collective term, as mentioned earlier, used by the Angami to refer to themselves and some of their neighbouring communities. Tenyidie is said to take most of its vocabulary from the Kohima dialect. Ura Academy (literally, u-ra means ‘our place/village’) is an Angami institution for the development of Tenyidie language at Kohima. It is concerned with developing syllabi and publishing literature ranging from novels and history books to school textbooks written in Tenyidie. It also publishes a newsletter called Ura dze. A fortnightly newspaper called Teizeipfü is published in Tenyidie in Kohima. Besides news of national and international current affairs, it publishes features on social and cultural aspects of the Angami, such as clan origin legends, descriptions of festivals, and meanings of traditional dress. The Tenyidie language is taught in Nagaland University and in schools up to Senior Secondary level. Most subjects are taught in Tenyidie in the primary schools in Kohima district. However, not many Angami are conversant in Tenyidie and I have found it difficult to find people who could assist me in translating the relevant material from books written in Tenyidie into English. The problem seems to lie with the tonal aspect of the language. As the diacritical marks are not used in the printed text, it sometimes makes translation of the text difficult, as the same word can have different meanings. The spellings of words are not always standardized, and this makes the writing down of Angami terms difficult. I have tried to follow the most popular spelling patterns. With the dialect variation, sometimes the same term is pronounced differently, thus changing the way one would spell it; for example, themu-mia (diviner) is pronounced as themu-ma in Western Angami. Sometimes, when I asked how to spell a certain word, I was told in a matter-of-fact way that, having spent so much time with the Angami, I should be able to spell the words myself! Besides Angami, the other languages that are spoken in Kohima district are Nagamese, English and a miniscule amount of Hindi. Nagamese is more of a ‘market language’ that has developed into the lingua franca among the Naga ethnic groups. However, due to its limited vocabulary with regard to many customary features, it is not by itself enough to carry out intensive, in-depth interviews or conversations, and a combination of Angami and English is often needed for a fuller account. As a fieldworker faced with alternative Angami

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

45

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

dialects and with the common use of both Nagamese and English, I found myself, like those with whom I talked, using this threefold combination. Ideally, I would have preferred full competence in at least one Angami dialect but this level of proficiency eluded me. Such linguistic hybridity is hardly what is recommended for ethnographic research and I cannot claim to find it at all satisfactory. But, although my own case is extreme, it does point up the plight of many Naga who often see themselves as being ‘between languages’ and yet as having to advance themselves through such multiplicity or even, if highly educated, through raising their level of English. An organization called the Ura Academy used to conduct courses in Angami until the early 1980s when they were abruptly discontinued, and there is currently no institutional short-term, intensive teaching of Angami language, even though texts in it still exist (these being an invaluable source of vocabulary and phrases for myself together with friends doubling as interpreters). The linguistic situation mirrors not only that of Naga sociocultural heterogeneity that has been discussed in this chapter from the mid-nineteenthcentury British annexation of Naga Hills until the present time, and that partly rests on the fact, as Hutton puts it above, that Naga groups were earlier cut off from each other by ‘forest, mountain and river’. It reflects also the way in which re-globalizing discourses such as Christianity, nationalist politics and reverse flows of international migration throw people together in new forms of incomplete interaction against a background of continuing home social organization and remembered colonial history. As we shall see in succeeding chapters, this tension between globally dispersed interaction seen as incomplete and local, if threatened, continuity persists in relations between church and customary religion, and between traditional and missionary forms of healing.

Notes 1. Census of India 2001. Number of Christians in Nagaland state is given as 1,790,349 out of a population of 1,990,036. 2. These are the Angami, Ao, Chakhesang, Chang, Khiamneungan, Konyak, Liangmai, Lotha, Phom, Pouchuri, Rengma, Rongmei, Sangtam, Sumi, Yimchungrü and Zemi. 3. The 2011 Census was conducted meticulously in Nagaland to avoid miscounting. As a result it was the only state in India which showed a reduction in overall population or a negative population growth rate. The population count was 1,990,036 in the 2001 Census, nearly 9,000 more than in 2011. The earlier ‘over’ counting was blamed on inflated numbers reported by villages in order to get more money for rural development schemes. Retrieved 9 April 2011 from www.morungexpress.com 4. It is also popularly known as ‘Barra-basti’, in Anglicized Hindi, literally, ‘the big village’ (the correct Hindi term would be ‘Badi-basti’ as badi is the right adjective for the feminine noun, basti). Even in 1870s the village had about nine hundred houses and today it has more than three thousand (Butler 1875–79, Census of India 2001). 5. Now known as Chumukedima, a satellite township situated five kilometres from Dimapur.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

46

A Matter of Belief

6. See Zou (2005) for a discursive write-up on the colonial construct of ‘headhunting’. See also Dirks (1995) on the deliberate creation of cultural differences between the colonized and the colonizer. 7. After the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857–58, the East India Company was dissolved and the administration of India was passed over to the British Government. The capital of British India was moved from Calcutta to Delhi. 8. See chapter 6 for details. 9. See Naga Database at www.alanmacfarlane.com 10. See Franke (2009), Hilaly (2007) for a detailed discussion of the British imperial expansionist strategy in north-east India in the nineteenth century. Zou (2005) questions the emphasis on headhunting by the British officers as a means to justify military expeditions against the hill communities. 11. The term khel derives from the Pashtun word khel for kinship groups. It was used by the British to refer to the clan-based spatial divisions of the Naga villages. It is now part of the vocabulary of Nagamese, the lingua-franca, and is commonly used by the Naga to refer to wards occupied by a single clan that are, otherwise, known by the term for ‘clan’ in their respective languages. 12. See Mackenzie 1884 and Elwin 1969: 179, 185. 13. A monument commemorating the Khonoma villagers who died in the uprising has been erected on the summit of a hill near the village. 14. For a detailed report of the incident, see Johnstone 1896: 147–60; Cawley 1930 cited in Elwin 1969: 563–80 and Cawley’s typescript (n.d.). 15. It took several days before the British could send a message for reinforcement of troops to Shillong as the Angami had successfully intercepted their mail runners. The assault was carried out with a force consisting of ‘the 44th S.L.I., under Colonel Nuttall, C.B., a detachment of the 43rd A.L.I., under Major Evans, and two mountain guns under Lieutenant Mansel, R.A.’ (Mackenzie 1884, cited in Elwin 1969: 187). 16. See Singha (2011) for a detailed account of the politics of Naga Labour Corps and the reasons behind the recruitment by the British and for Naga joining such a venture. Archives at the Pitt Rivers Museum (available from Naga Database at www.alanmacfarlane.com) further inform us of the hero’s welcome which the contingent received on their return to Naga Hills, and that medals were distributed, mainly by Hutton and Mills, among the Naga who returned from the Labour Corps in recognition of their work. The Naga who led the contingent were also presented with red cloths which were normally reserved only for the government interpreters and village heads. 17. In a personal conversation with Reverend I. Bendang Wati (January and September 2010), he said that at that particular time before the independence of India, many students, including himself, supported the Indian National Congress and admired the charismatic leadership of the freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose who visited Assam in 1938–39. 18. For detailed accounts, see Bower (1946), Betts (1950) and Longkumer (2010). 19. It is ironic that Jadonang had fought as a soldier for the British in Mesopotamia in 1917 during the First World War (Yonuo 1974: 126). 20. For detailed accounts, see Yonuo (1982) and Kamei (2004). 21. See Mildred Archer papers, the Pitt Rivers Museum archives (also available from Naga Database at www.alanmacfarlance.com). 22. Their numbers were: 1,000 Sema (Sumi), 400 Lotha, 200 Rengma and 200 Ao Naga according to Sema (1986: 80). Singh (1995: 23) gives a similar tally, but divides the number of Lotha recruits into 200 Lotha with the rest belonging to neighbouring Chang, Sangtam and Phom, communities which were allegedly from the ‘transfrontier’ villages that were outside the direct control of the British administration (see Hutton diaries 25.11.1921, Pitt Rivers Museum, Hutton manuscript Box 2, Mills letter 15.11.1936, Pitt Rivers Museum archives and Naga Database at www.alanmacfarlane.com). Yonuo (1974: 123–24) gives their numbers as more than 4,000, but does not give any source for this information. There were supposedly no

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

47

Angami among the Naga Labour Corps. Interestingly, the Lotha Naga of Pangti village composed a folk song to praise their recruitment in the Labour Corps (see Mills 1922: 205). The photographs of different ‘sections’ of these Naga recruits are also available at the Pitt Rivers Museum photographic archives (see also Joshi 2008b: 47). Henry Balfour was the first director of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which has a large collection of Naga artifacts. Interestingly, the collections include a German helmet which was brought back by a Naga as a trophy, and was decorated with bison horns and bamboo shavings in a fashion similar to that of a skull from a real human head taken in a headhunting raid. Professor Rodney Needham, who fought in Second World War at Kohima, showed me in 1988 the photographs of bombed and burnt Kohima and the surrounding hills. They revealed the extent of damage caused during the war. A museum dedicated to the Battle of Kohima of 1944, with an extensive display of photographs and artefacts of war, has now opened at the Kisama Heritage Village outside the town of Kohima on the NH 39 or the Kohima–Imphal road. Angami writer Easterine Kire (2010) describes the hardships Kohima villagers endured when they were compelled to vacate their houses and take shelter in the surrounding forests. Dobashi is an Assamese term literally meaning ‘bilingual’ (do ‘two’, bashi ‘one who speaks’). See Mildred Archer’s typescript ‘Journey to Nagaland. An account of Six Months Spent in the Naga Hills in 1947’. The original papers are at the Pitt Rivers Museum Archives, University of Oxford. They are also available from Naga Database at www.alanmacfarlane.com. Of course such writings are selective, subjective and open to debate for the accuracy of historical content. Nagaland has been a restricted area under the Foreigners (Protected Areas) Order, 1958. From the year 2000, Nagaland was opened to foreign tourists who were allowed to travel as married couples or in groups of four or more for a period of ten to twenty days. But since January 2011, the requirement for a restricted area permit for foreigners has been removed as an experiment for two years to try to enhance tourism in Nagaland; but requirement for an Inner Line Permit for Indian citizens has continued. In an ongoing process of reorganization of the territories, Tuensang Area from the erstwhile North Eastern Frontier Agency was merged with Naga Hills to form Naga Hills Tuensang Area district within Assam (see Singh 1995; Sema 1986; Ao 1970 and Horam 1975). NEFA is an acronym for North East Frontier Agency, now known as the state of Arunachal Pradesh. See Haokip (2001) for an assessment of Naga (and Kuki) nationalism. See Sema 1986: 59–72; Singh 1995: 98; Rustomji 1983: 69; West 1999: 38–39; and Horam 1975, 1988. The inclusion of all the Naga inhabited areas in the May 2001 extension of ceasefire between the Naga insurgent group, NSCN (IM), and the Indian government resulted in protests by the neighbouring states (especially Manipur). This forced the Indian government to restrict the ceasefire to the Nagaland state alone. Retrieved 28 July 2001 from news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/ world/south_asia; and 25 September 2011 from www.rediff.com/news/2001/jul/27naga2. For example, Congress, Naga People’s Council (NPC), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the three prominent Naga nationalists groups: Naga National Council (NNC), two factions of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland/Nagalim – NSCN (Isak & Muivah or IM) and NSCN (Khaplang or K). In recent years, several smaller parties have also entered the state politics. The present (2012) elected state government is formed by a coalition of different parties excluding the Congress, called the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland. It is common knowledge in Nagaland that the political leaders of Congress and NPC parties are on the ‘hit-list’ of one faction of NSCN and under the protection of the other. Two are known as the Government of People’s Republic of Nagaland/Nagalim (GPRN) and are associated with two factions of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland/Nagalim (NSCN-IM

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

48

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

A Matter of Belief

and NSCN-K), and the third, the Federal Government of Nagaland (FGN), is associated with the original nationalist group, Naga National Council (NNC). Interestingly, this physical resemblance has been used by the Naga to emphasize their nonIndianness. Their claim has been recognized by groups such as the International Work Group for Indigenous People, who have placed Naga under South-East Asian communities, while putting other surrounding ethnic groups like the Mizos under South Asia (IWGIA 1998). Similar contentions are made in the writings of Kirsch (1973) and West (1999), both of whom see the Naga as being culturally closer to the hill peoples of Thailand and Burma. In what is clearly an oversight, the long list actually gives only sixty-four names, omitting one of the most prominent groups, namely the Ao Naga (Nuh and Lasuh 2002: 22). The myths and legends of some Naga ethnic groups have been recorded by authors such as Hutton (1921a, 1921b), Mills (1922, 1926, 1937), Hodson (1911), Smith (1925), Sardeshpande (1987) and Sanyü (1996). In September 2009, the Ao Naga council (Ao Senden) expelled a prominent village Changki from the ‘citizenship’ of Ao group, accusing the village of not adhering to the official version of the history of origin and subsequent migration of the Ao group of Naga from the legendry Longtrok (six stones) site situated near the village of Chungliyimti (16 September 2009, Morung Express online edition). In 2008, there was division within the clans of Changki village on the issues of seniority, as a consequence of which members of one clan were forced to leave the village. The issue has not been resolved fully; those who were allowed to return have had to forego claims on land and businesses previously owned by them and they are also forbidden to walk on the main path of the village. See the Nagalim web page on the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) website, www.unpo.org, accessed 10 August 2010. See also Hutton (1921b: 19, 353); Mills (1922: 3–4) and Sanyü (1996: 68–69). There are variations regarding the nature of the act that led to the destruction of the magical properties. According to the Lotha Naga version, an elderly couple were asked to copulate on the stone, thus ending its magical property (see Mills 1922: 3–4 and footnote by Hutton). See also chapter 3. I visited the village again in February 2011, and saw the changes that had occurred in the past twenty years. The stone, although inside a wall, had a thin pipe going over it which carried water from a tank on the right-hand side to the newly built village guesthouse on the left. The person accompanying me, who belonged to the village, stood on the stone to get a good view of the surrounding area, and I was told that it was not taboo to stand on the stone. For a detailed account of the oral history of Angami village formation, see Sanyü (1996). I have found reference to this legend in two published sources: the souvenir of the Tenyimia Union (1996: 65), and an article by G. Kabui (1996: 18). See appendix 2 for the text inscribed on the stone. Tenyimia Union was refounded in 1995 at the initiative of the Angami Public Organisation, the apex body of the Angami Naga. It was earlier known as ‘Tenyimi’, comprising of Chakhesang, Angami, Poumai, Pochuri, Rengma, Zeliangrong and Memai Naga groups (Tenyimia Union 1996: 2). Hutton mentions them as Thevoma and Thezoma, deriving respectively from Kepepfuma and Kepezoma, the names of the two ancestors (1921a: 110). Das mentions them as Thevo and Tepa, but in his case study Tepa is the moiety from which priests are chosen (1993: 130). According to Hutton there is contention about which one is the elder, as the Thekrü claim that Thevo is the younger brother, who tricked the older one by announcing his arrival first (Hutton 1921a: 112). Hutton also mentions that they use separate terms for addressing father and mother: Thevoma or Kepezoma call them apo and azo and Thekrüma or Kepepfüma say apvu and apfü respectively (Hutton 1921a: 110). Das mentions that among the southern Angami (or Zonuo-

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Mountainous State

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

keyhonuo) Tepa use the terms apfu and fapu and Thevo use azo and aputsa for mother and father respectively (1993: 131). See also, Sanyü (1996: 68). Dze also means ‘news’. See Marwah and Srivastava (1987) for a detailed discussion of the significance of kharu. The Khonoma diaspora in Kohima town has formed an age-set called Khonoma Ketsei-u Kikramia, Kohima, which is now on Facebook. See also Das (1993: 131) for information on the age-set system in Viswema, a Southern Angami village. See Joshi (2008d) and Manchanda (2004) on the role of Naga Mothers’ Association. These are: high, mid, mid fall, low fall and low (Giridhar 1980: 5; and Kuolie 2006). Angami Grammar by P.P. Giridhar was published in 1980 by the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore. A detailed book on Tenyidie by D. Kuolie (2006), a lecturer in Tenyidie at Nagaland University, has recently been published by Ura Academy which publishes work by the Angami writers. These two are the only detailed systematic books on Angami grammar available today. There is a separate book on Angami phonetics by Ravindran (1974) of CIIL, besides about a dozen other publications by British officers, missionaries and Angami teachers (McCabe 1887; Burling 1960; Butler 1875; Grierson 1903; Marrison 1967; Haralu 1933; Rivenburg 1905; Supplee 1930; Pienünuo 1931; Sekhose 1984, 1986). Ahum Victor, a Tanghkhul Naga linguist, writes that the standardization process undergone by most Naga languages has meant that second generation migrants in the townships find it difficult to maintain their native village dialect (1996: 41–51).

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

61.

49

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Chapter 2

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

CLASSIFYING SPIRIT AND SICKNESS

It has long been established in anthropology that in many small-scale, preindustrialized societies an aetiology of disease and illness is commensurate with, or at least related to, cosmology and concepts of body and soul (for examples, see Evans-Pritchard [1956] 1962; Desjarlais 1990, 1992, 1994; Devisch 1993; Foster 1976; Good 1994; Kleinman 1980; Boddy 1989, 1994; Steedley 1988; and Lock 1993). Thus, to talk of sickness and misfortune is also to talk of a person’s dislocated place in a world that jointly comprises what we translate as society, nature, morality and an afterlife or para-life. It has also been observed that when people convert to a world religion, certain pre-existing beliefs may be adapted to express ideas in the new religion, while others continue as a parallel discourse (see Barker 1993; Hefner 1993; Kammerer 1989; Comaroff 1980, 1981; Burdick 1993; Constable 1994). The resulting mix goes hand in hand with changing vocabularies drawn from old and new languages to express the inevitable mergers and conflicts of ideas and practices. In the case of Christianity, missionary doctrine tended to label the complexities of the indigenous, holistic world-view as ‘superstition’, ‘devil worship’ or the like, and engaged in often ingenious semantic exercises to fit a pre-existing term to a distinctive Christian concept (Meyer 1999). As a result, ‘religion’ (i.e. Christianity), ‘medicine’ (i.e. the biomedicine which missionaries brought with them) and ‘superstition’ (i.e. indigenous cosmological holism) became distinct and essentialized concepts. But the pre-Christian intertwining of ideas and practices continued alongside and even within the local version of the new world religion, reshaping it within a frame guarded to varying degrees through their religious emissaries by powerful councils or headquarters located overseas. Angami were animists before a majority of them converted to Christianity. At present approximately 10 per cent of the Angami follow the indigenous religion. Large-scale conversion to Christianity has been notably rapid, accelerating especially in recent years, and so it is not surprising that the traditional belief system of the Angami continues to be significant. The interesting question is to ask what evolving shape the new combination is taking and how much it affects and is affected by other currents of significance such as the nationalist movement and the rise of biomedicine and modern education. The argument of this chapter is to show that the Angami pantheon

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

52

A Matter of Belief

is not passively giving way to the effects of a world religion but, on the contrary, complements and challenges it. Of course, it has changed in the face of modernity as it must always have done in the course of its history when confronted by unexpected local and regional events. But the pantheon has not been suppressed and, in order to show its continuing adaptability, it is instructive to compare the beliefs as they exist today with the description given almost nine decades ago by Hutton in his monograph (1921a) which was written at the time Christianity had just begun to make inroads in the Angami area. Although Hutton aimed to record mainly what he regarded as traditional aspects, nevertheless, we do get an idea of changes and continuities in some concepts that had begun to take place under the influence of Christian teachings, especially with translation of parts of the Bible into the Angami language, the use of Angami words for biblical terms and how, recursively, this affected their original meanings and people’s sense of morality and vulnerability. It was a development which takes us directly into an understanding of how Angami traditional concepts of health and aetiology of disease embodied their religious beliefs and notions of body and soul, and continued in the context of conversion to Christianity. The Angami pantheon which is described is therefore to be regarded as a flexible interrelationship of complementary concepts, active spirits and human-like characters which, individually, may sometimes have undergone some alteration, but have done so only within a relatively constant pattern.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Angami Religion Nanyü is the Angami term for religion used by both the Christian and the nonChristian Angami. Nanyü is also used for any ritual or rite which may be performed to propitiate spirits and ancestors as well as the rituals that are carried out by the Christian Angami. At its most elaborate, a nanyü entails wearing full traditional ceremonial dress, and at its least, it could simply be offering a little rice beer to the spirits before taking a sip from one’s beer mug (see also Hutton 1921a: 194). My informants often used the Hindi term puj¯a to refer to rituals when explaining the ritualistic aspect of nanyü to me in Nagamese. In this sense what we translate as Angami religion, Nanyü, comprises a broad sweep of smaller and greater, conjoined actions, words and belief, whose more precise differentiation is through identification of specific spirit and other agents. The adherents of the pantheon are called Krüna-nanyü (Krüna for short), literally meaning ‘followers of the religion of the ancestors’. They are also known as Tsana-mia, Pfutsana or Krüna-mia; the first two are derived from putsa or pfutsano, the Angami term for lineage, literally meaning ‘descendants of forefathers’. Interestingly, sometimes the Krüna, the traditional animists, are referred to as Tengei-mia (Tenyimia), a term which is otherwise used for both

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

53

Christian and non-Christian Angami, as well as for some other Naga groups who speak closely related dialects of Tenyidie (i.e. the standardized ‘official’ Angami language largely based on the Kohima dialect). Several times in casual conversation, Christians referred to non-Christians as ‘Hindus’ implying that they believed in several taboos, gods and rituals (i.e. as pantheistic); on several occasions they were also spoken of as ‘pagans’ and ‘heathens’. By contrast, the Christian Angami are called Kehou-mia meaning those who ‘gather’ (kehou) to ‘pray’ (kecha) in the church (kehou-ki, ki ‘house’). The term also seems to reflect the visible differences in the ways of worship between the Krüna and Christians. The Krüna emphasis on individual worship, except during the collective calendrical rituals such as Sekrenyi, differs considerably from the congregational and frequent nature of church gatherings. This difference is tied into the way that the non-Christians (Krüna) spatially distribute the hierarchy of non-human entities making up the pantheon, which precludes regular gatherings for worship. The beginnings of such difference are evident when we compare modern circumstances with those described by Hutton who provides a rich source of terms and concepts in use at the time of his research.

The Angami Spirit World: God as Mother of Spirit and Being

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Notion of terhuo-mia and Ukepenuopfü The concept of terhuo-mia is central to Angami religious thought. The term terhuo-mia, meaning ‘spirit’ (rhuo, te is a classifier) ‘people’ (mia), refers to a range of different kinds of spirits including Ukepenuopfü, the supreme creator in the Angami pantheon. It is not dissimilar to the Nuer concept of kwoth, which Evans-Pritchard translates both as God and as refractions of such Spirit ([1956] 1962: 1). As was already recorded by Hutton (1921a: 183), for the Angami almost everything had a connection with terhuo-mia – natural phenomena as well as personal misfortune could be a result of the terhuo-mia’s action. Ukepenuopfü was regarded as the greatest terhuo-mia and was considered to be the mother of all the terhuo-mia. The term is to be analysed as U-kepenuo-pfü; kepenuo literally means ‘birth’, the suffix pfü denotes feminine gender,1 and the u- is a first person plural possessive prefix; therefore Ukepenuopfü roughly means ‘the female one who gave birth to us’ or that entity who is responsible for our creation (see also Hutton 1921a: 180; Sekhose 1984: 91). Ukepenuopfü in the Angami pantheon occupies the status of a female deus otiosus, that is to say, one who created and then retreated into inactivity. In an unpublished typescript (n.d.: 16) Hutton remarked that, ‘the Angami … worship a “spirit mother” – Kepenopfü who once lived on earth, is now located in the sky and is regarded as the ultimate creatress or mother of all men’.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

54

A Matter of Belief

Ukepenuopfü is nowadays thought to be benevolent and remote; however, the Angami myths collected by Hutton (1921a: 181, 260–61) suggest that she formally played an active role in the affairs of human beings. Although Ukepenuopfü is still considered remote, she is regularly propitiated during the calendrical rituals, and her overall significance remains crucial, especially as a major manifestation of the terhuo-mia spirit principle. I was told in Khonoma village that the ritual of kizie, in which rice beer (zutho) is offered to the ancestors and spirits in either a plantain or chiese leaf during various calendrical rituals, is specifically related to the creator spirit. All my queries as to whom the kizie had been offered would meet with the standard answer, ‘to terhuomia’. However, when I specifically asked whether the terhuo-mia they were referring to was, indeed, Ukepenuopfü, I was told yes and that terhuo-mia and Ukepenuopfü are the same. The terhuo-mia who is propitiated at the calendrical rituals is Ukepenuopfü, and those given offerings at the time of contingencies, such as illness and epidemic, are the ‘lesser’ terhuo-mia. Although the Krüna people I spoke to in Khonoma say that Ukepenuopfü is female, they also insist that Ukepenuopfü as the creator spirit incorporates both male and female aspects. They explained to me that for procreation both male and female are required; therefore, Terhuopfu (male aspect) and Terhuopfü (female aspect) had come together to create ‘us’ and they are together known as Ukepenuopfü. The women perform kizie for Terhuopfü by placing offerings at the entrance of the house and at the central pole inside the living room which has the hearth; for Terhuopfu, on the other hand, a ritual called thesie is performed at the time of Sekrenyi in which the village priest shoots the first arrow at the ritual bamboo which is erected near the entrance to the village. As mentioned in chapter 1, the terms for mother and father used by Angami belonging to the Thekrü moiety (younger of the two moieties) are apfü and apfu respectively, which clearly relate to Terhuopfü and Terhuopfu. The Angami are the only group among the Naga whose supreme being is specifically female. Ukepenuopfü’s status as the creatrix or birth-giver of all beings is also reflected in the Angami myth of the relationship of man with the tiger, on the one hand, and spirit or terhuo-mia, on the other. According to the myth,2 man, spirit and the tiger were brothers – sons of the same woman. The man ate his food cooked, the tiger ate his raw and the spirit had his smokedried. But the tiger always created trouble. One day the mother, tired of her children’s squabbles, held a race between the man and the tiger; it was decided that the first to touch a grass mark in the forest could continue to live in the village while the loser would leave for the dark forest. The man won the race with the connivance of the spirit and the tiger thus left for the forest (see also Hutton 1921a: 261–62). In this way, the three came to be spatially distributed; the tiger lives in the forest, the man in the village and the spirit occupies both domains as well as the area between the village and the forest. The different food habits further emphasize the contrast between the tiger and the man, and suggest the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

55

intermediary or liminal character of the spirit (see also Wessing 1986). This close relationship between them is perhaps reflected in the Angami belief in the spirits who help human beings, and the phenomenon of tekhu-mevi – men whose souls roam the forest in the form of a tiger or, less commonly, a leopard (see also Hutton 1921a: 243–44, 1921c, 1963). Although the older ethnography mentions that Ukepenuopfü is thought to live in the sky (Hutton 1921a: 181), on several occasions I was told that she lives in the world of the dead (known as rünyü gi) whose exact location is not known – it could be either in the sky or under the earth. In Kigwema village I was told specifically that ‘people of Kigwema area’ point to the dense forest at the far end of Dzükou valley (between southern Nagaland and Manipur) as the place of the dead. In the valley flows a river named Kezeirü (literally, ‘dark river’). Hunters who have seen the place say that no sunlight filters through the dense canopy, which makes it difficult for them to see any animal that enters the forest.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Types of terhuo-mia: The Good, the Bad and the Mischievous Interviews with Angami diviners revealed that the terhuo-mia are broadly divided into sky spirits and earth spirits. The sky spirits, known as tei-rhuo-mia (tei ‘sky’), live in the sky, are white in colour and wear white clothes. In contrast, the earth spirits, known as ketzi/keji-rhuo-mia (ketzi/keji ‘earth’), are dark like the earth, live on the earth and wear dark clothes ‘like us’. This has an interesting parallel to the colour of clothes worn by the Angami; lohe, a black cloth with red (or pink) and green stripes along the border is the everyday cloth, while the white lohra-mhoshü with a black and red design is worn mainly during the festivals. Although both categories of spirits can cause trouble to human beings, the sky spirits are thought to be less troublesome, and so are ‘clean’ or kemesa, while the earth spirits are considered unclean and troublemakers. Sometimes these spirits are also spoken of by their colour; in a Western Angami village (Jotsoma), a diviner referred to them as terhuo-kecha (kecha ‘white’) meaning white spirits, and terhuo-keti (keti ‘black’) meaning black spirits. He further elaborated that the black spirits have long hair all over their bodies and are bigger in size than the white spirits, who in turn wear their hair short. This dualistic classification can be expressed as follows and is of course broadly found in many other cosmologies: sky white short hair clean

earth dark/black long hair unclean

The terms sky spirit and earth spirit convey an idea of a clearly demarcated spatial distribution of the terhuo-mia. Yet, when I asked diviners (who are said

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

56

A Matter of Belief

to be helped by these spirits in their divination) where the terhuo-mia lived, I was given different answers which suggest greater dispersal. One diviner said that the sky and earth spirits had separate villages which are at the end of a bridge near a mountain; the path to the village of the earth spirits at the foot of the mountain is full of thorns (therefore, unclean) while that to the village of the sky spirits up in the mountain is clean. However, other diviners vaguely said that the spirits lived ‘here and there’. Somewhat close to the category of the sky spirits is that of teigi-rhuo-mia, which, for want of a better term, is now translated as ‘angel’ by Angami. However, they are regarded as differing from Christian angels. Teigi-rhuo-mia are basically spirit people who live in the sky and are ‘good terhuo-mia’. An Angami myth about the marriage between an Angami man named Jiesu-u and a teigi-rhuo-mia states that the Angami learned all their rituals of feast of merit (zhatho) from the teigi-rhuo-mia. In Chumukedima village, a male spirit called Zhasonyü is said to be the ‘biggest terhuo-mia in the sky’ (zha ‘big’). He is thought to be helped by two female spirits – Saimapfüka and Kemesathopfüka – who are perceived as clean or kemesa spirits. It is said that a diviner named Kenoudi, who lived a hundred years ago, was able to communicate with Zhasonyü and act as a mediator between him and men. The Angami hierarchical ordering of the spirits is to place the souls of the dead, who are said to become terhuo-mia at death, at the lowest level, followed by those terhuo-mia who trouble human beings by destroying crops, and killing domestic animals. Above them are placed rodo, evil spirits akin to the devil, who are capable of killing human beings upon meeting them. Above all these are the good spirits who help human beings. Hierarchy and dispersed spatial ordering thus help perpetuate an integral pantheon which can reach out to all communities through shared, if sometimes modified, terms and concepts. As well as providing explanatory order, the pantheon is a source of moral reference, whose significance was therefore considerable when the Christian missionaries arrived, and still is. Depending on their inherent nature, spirits or terhuo-mia are either good or bad. The good spirits called rotshe (my informant insisted that it is ro not rhuo as in tehruo-mia) or rhuochou-mia are benign. The sky spirits are generally identified as terhuo-kevi (kevi ‘good’).3 The bad spirits are generally known as kerhu terhuo-mia (kerhu4 ‘dirty/bad’) or terhuo-kesuo (kesuo ‘bad’). Most are also referred to as rutzeh (see also Hutton 1921a: 182) which are of two kinds: rodo and rohlo. Rodo, also known as ruo-se, rho-se (perhaps variations of rhuo-suo: rhuo ‘spirit’, suo ‘bad’) are said to be the most evil who are out to harm people and may bring instant death to them, especially to those who are thought to have a weak soul. They live in the forest and are capable of transforming into both human and animal form and emitting various sounds. When a rodo makes high-pitched whistling sounds at night it portends an epidemic or the death of several people. Rohlo, on the other hand, do not necessarily kill people, but trouble them by throwing a pebble at them

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

57

or hitting them. They could cause fatal injuries by striking people down and making them bleed through their nose and mouth. In Khonoma village, nonChristians told me that what their forefathers thought was the handiwork of rohlo is now recognized by them as being symptoms of very high blood pressure. It is said that rodo and rohlo have been seen by hunters who go into deep forest, in the form of animals who suddenly vanish on approach. In Chumukedima village I came across the concept of kesüdi or kes-kedi (kesü is a variation of kesuo; kedi ‘king’), a spirit thought to be the king of bad terhuo-mia who has huge teeth, is ferocious and kills humans instantly. Interestingly, I was told that it ‘existed in forefathers’ time and has not been seen in recent years’. Both Christians and Krüna told me several anecdotes to illustrate the kind of trouble and mischief bad spirits may cause. For example, once three men from Mima village were returning very late at night through the jungle. They were walking in a single file, when suddenly the last man felt that someone had hit him on the shin with a small pebble. He was overcome with pain and had to be helped by the other two men to reach the village. His injury was ascribed to the throwing of a small pebble by a bad spirit, as under normal circumstances such a small stone would not result in a grievous injury. It is held that in the past, when most people were non-Christian, it was common to hear a sound of someone being slapped and then find one man in a group bleeding from the part of the body where he had been hit by the invisible being. Angami also believe that spirits can affect the personality and nature of a person. Rodo and rotshe compete with each other for control over the soul of an individual. Rotshe imparts a helpful and benign nature, whereas a person under the influence of rodo becomes unsystematic, badly behaved, unprincipled and, in general, wayward; such a person is called a rodo-u-kelu or rudo, literally, ‘one who is under the influence of rodo’.5 Rodo may even use this power or influence by becoming a helping spirit of a diviner, as happened with Chükhohori, a former diviner and necromancer. Rodo also transmit to people under their influence the knowledge of how to make poison, who are then called therie-kese-mia (therie ‘poison’, kese ‘to own’, mia ‘people’) or ‘people who have the knowledge of poison’, and who are compelled by the rodo to poison others, even their own family members. Women are more vulnerable to the influence of rodo and therefore more likely to have knowledge of poison. But the sanctions against using such knowledge are severe and suggest that culpability is in fact shared by the human agent as well as his/her rodo spirit. Anyone found to be practising poisoning is in accordance with the Angami customary law expelled from the village (rhoke-wa ‘thrown out’). Some years ago, a woman from Phesama village (near Kohima) was accused of killing a young man by poisoning. The man had died of an illness, the cause of which could not be diagnosed by the doctor and it was believed to be a case of poisoning. The woman denied the allegations, yet, when asked by the village committee to take the oath6 on her life (known as phouse rü se ‘life taking oath’), she refused to do so. Since the relatives of the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

58

A Matter of Belief

deceased did not hesitate in undertaking the oath on their own lives in order to reassert their accusations, the village council decided to expel the woman from the village. In Chumukedima village similar characteristics are ascribed to a spirit called Yhashu who, in addition to imparting knowledge of poison, is thought to descend on people along with the mist and abduct them for a few days, feeding them earthworms during this period. The concept of spirits who abduct people is present in other Angami villages too, but they do not have a specific name for such spirits, calling them simply terhuo-mia. Hutton (1921a: 182) also wrote about such spirits mentioning, ‘Telepfü … is a mischievous being. She carries people away – men, women, or children – and hides them. She does not kill them but renders them senseless, though if their relations succeed in finding them again they regain consciousness.’ Such spirits take people away for two or three days, sometimes even for a week. They can hide people behind an object as small as a leaf so that the search parties sent out from the village cannot see them. The ‘abducted’ people on their return say that they were well taken care of by their ‘friends’ who fed them good food. My respondents added that these people on their return do not look as though they had been without food for some time. Such abductions are said to occur even nowadays irrespective of the religious inclination of the person. A boy from Kigwema, who was returning to the village with cattle he had been herding, sat down near a tree stump to rest, and although the cattle found their way back, the boy failed to return to the village. He went missing for three days, and on the fourth day the search party from the village found him sitting next to the tree stump. When asked where he had been for the last three days, he replied, pointing at the stump, that he was with the spirits who fed him rice and fish. Similarly a woman from the same village who had disappeared for a few days was found near a river; she claimed to have been taken for sightseeing by the spirit friends. The view taken is that some people remain normal after such incidents, while others become mentally unstable, a contrast that evokes the variable role played by spirit possession in either restoring a person to normality or pushing them beyond it and, as indicated below, into the world of the spirits. Non-spirit Beings: Sometimes Difficult and Almost Human There are some entities who are regarded in some villages as spirits while in others as non-spirit beings, even ‘human-like’. That there is this difference of identification can perhaps be taken as moral ambivalence concerning the limits of what it is to be human. The behaviour of spirits is not normally expected to be that of humans. Yet humans do sometimes transgress in a manner befitting spirits, while spirits themselves sometime behave with care, compassion and even a sense of responsibility, like humans. This fuzzy separation of spirit and non-spirit behaviour points to the moral dilemma that human frailty and its

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

59

imperfections exposes, and which is of common concern to both Christians and non-Christians. Humans are enjoined and may intend to behave according to moral rules, whether of animism or Christianity, but sometimes fail to do so, for reasons which may or may not be beyond their control. I used information provided by Hutton about these humanly iconic non-spirit beings to ask specific questions, and was presented with examples of some of the concepts, albeit with village-wise variation. Although Hutton (1921a: 182) categorized them as terhuo-mia who have specific names and functions, there is, as mentioned, an ambiguity regarding their specific status both in his descriptions and in my findings, provided by both non-Christians and Christians.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Miawenuo Miawenuo, also called Maveno and Miagweno, is generally thought to have a feminine disposition, although the Chakro Angami say it could be either male or female. She is described as having a short stature, with long tresses reaching her feet, which point backwards.7 She is seen ‘roaming around’ in cultivated areas (but Chakro villagers say she is to be seen in deep forest), carrying a shoulder bag which contains treasure. If asked for a favour she is able to bestow fame and fortune, but her favours are reserved only for those who happen to see her before she sees them. A person is supposed to make his wish quickly upon spotting Miawenuo; any delay in doing so could bring bad luck, such as making the person childless. She is also said to challenge people to a bout of wrestling. Hutton (1921a: 182) mentioned her as Maweno (the term used by Chakro villages) and wrote, ‘Maweno is the Angami goddess of fruitfulness. She keeps pebbles and paddy in her bag. If a man meets her and asks for anything, she gives him one gift, never two, a pebble or a grain or two of paddy. If she gives it to him for his fields he will have good crops, if for his cattle, many, many calves.’ It is principally the Chakro and the Southern Angami who maintain that Miawenuo is not a terhuo-mia, but more ‘like us human beings’. Interestingly, in Kigwema village I was told that during the headhunting days a hunter from the village mistakenly killed Miawenuo, who immediately turned into a stone which is situated a few kilometres away from the village. It is said that if anyone tries to lift the Miawenuo stone, it will lead to an instant thunderstorm. Although I was told that this event is known among all the Angami villages, I did not come across a similar story. However, most people say that Miawenuo has not been spotted in recent years. In Khonoma, the elders told me that an old woman from the village had had a brush with Miawenuo several years ago. One day when this woman went to her field she saw that the water in a pool near the stream was muddy. There were fresh footprints around it but she could not see anybody. She looked around, and on finding a small hole in the ground, she poked it with a stick to see if anyone was inside it, but did not find anything. Later in the day when she was husking the paddy, a piece of straw

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

60

A Matter of Belief

went into one of her eyes. When it became very painful she went to a diviner to find the cause. She was told that Miawenuo had caused injury to her eyes as she had hurt Miawenuo’s eyes when she had inserted a stick into the hole.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Chükheo and Dzüruopfü Chükheo is the owner or shepherd of all wild animals. Before setting out for a hunt both Krüna and Christians ask for his blessings, saying ‘Chükheo please give me your wild animals’. He is supposed to be a dwarf. Although most regard him as a terhuo-mia, in Kigwema village I was told that he is a man who had left his village to live in the jungle because the villagers did not like him, and over time became the owner of the wild animals. He is said to bless those who take his name before going for a hunt, but he could get annoyed if somebody laughs at him. I was told a story of a man who had asked for Chükheo’s blessing before leaving for the jungle. There he came across a small man dragging a huge animal. Finding the sight amusing, the man began to laugh. Upon this the small man, who was none other than Chükheo, became angry and released the big animal saying that the hunter would not get big game. In Khonoma village, a cliff on a nearby hill has a rock which the play of light and shadows in the early morning gives it the appearance of a human face. The people of Khonoma call it Chükheo’s face.8 Hutton also refers to two beings who are no doubt local variants of Chükheo. The first is a spirit called Chikeo, mentioned in one of the myths in the appendix (Hutton 1921a: 266), who is the provider of wild animals to the Angami; the second is Tsükho, the male of a dwarf couple called Tsükho and Dzürawu, mentioned in the main text, who according to Hutton, ‘preside over all the animals and to them prayers are offered before setting out for hunting’ (ibid.: 182). Dzürawu is nowadays known as Dzüruopfü9 in Chumukedima and Kigwema. In Chumukedima it is believed to be the spirit of the water who is responsible for all deaths by drowning; it is said to ‘pull its victim into the deep water’. In Kigwema, however, it is a female terhuo-mia who presides over everything that lives in water such as fish, crabs and snails. Traditionally, the Angami would put the extra catch back into the water, as keeping more than one needs would make the terhuo-mia angry.10 Meichimo; Mecümo The Angami I spoke to conceptualize Meichimo as a big brown caterpillar having a body full of hair who sits at the gate to the world of the dead.11 Meichimo asks the soul whether it is going up or down; if the answer is ‘up’, then the person to whom the soul belongs may recover from his illness, but saying ‘down’ would result in the death of that person. Thereafter the Meichimo asks the soul to pick up lice from its hair and kill them by biting and crushing between the teeth. The Angami have traditionally buried either beads from a

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

61

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

necklace or seeds of the gadzüsi plant with the body so that when Meichimo made his request to kill the lice, the dead could make the crushing sound by biting the beads or the seeds between their teeth and so deceive him (see also Hutton 1921a: 226). Today, only Krüna bury the beads and the seeds because the souls of the Christian Angami do not go to the same place, and therefore do not meet Meichimo. One of my informants spoke of Meichimo as the god of death, making an analogy with the Hindu god of death, Yamr a¯ j; he added that it is believed that if Meichimo visits anybody, it is certain that person will die. In addition to these spirits and beings, Hutton mentioned several other spirits, including for example, Tekhu-rhuo, god of tigers; Ayepi, who lives inside the house and bestows good luck on the householder; and Kecho-kerho, who lives in stone (ibid.: 182–83). My respondents claimed not to know of them, although one from Kigwema village told me that Tekhu-rhuo is to the tigers what Ukepenuopfü is to the human beings. It was explained that all human beings have a ruopfü (soul) and that above all their ruopfü presides Ukepenuopfü; similarly, Tekhu-rhuo presides over the ruopfü of all the tigers. I did not come across the term Ayepi, but the people of Chumukedima village have the concept of Thepinuo which has similar attributes. Thepinuo, whose footprints can be seen if she visits a house, brings prosperity to the household. She is also known as Kemeguo-ruopfü (kemeguo ‘one who brings prosperity’, relates to theguo ‘prosperity’). One of my Christian informants from Kigwema village reminisced that, as children, they used to play a game of ‘calling the spirit’: some ash from the hearth and a stick would be kept at the entrance to the house and all the children would cover their heads with a cloth and call the spirit. The leader of the group would then draw footprints in the ashes (my informant added, that they did not know it was the group leader who did so) and tell the children to open their eyes and see whether there were footprints. The Spirit of the Kharu, the Clan Gate It has been mentioned in chapter 1 that Angami villages were formerly surrounded with thorny bushes and ditches filled with spiked bamboo needles. The khel or wards in the village occupied by a single clan were also stockaded similarly. The entry and exit points of each khel had, and still have, a gate (kharu), which to this day is recognized as a rich source of information and moral understanding. The kharu itself is associated with a spirit known as kharu-rhuo, which protects the khel from enemies. According to one of the diviners, kharu-rhuo is ‘huge, of a very dark colour, but harmless’. However, a person with a weak soul is thought to get frightened on approaching a kharu. In the past, if natural calamities such as failure of crops or an epidemic followed the installation of a kharu, it would be replaced with another the following year. In this sense these gates retain the prime ritual position that they occupied in the traditional set-up. As the only entrance to the khel, the kharu also served

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

62

A Matter of Belief

as the point outside which the ‘other world’ began. The area inside the khel and village is called phe, meaning ‘house site’; that immediately outside the boundary of the khel and village is casie (sie, ‘outside’) and beyond that lies calha. Any offerings suggested by the diviner to the terhuo-mia at the time of a personal illness would be left outside the kharu, the place being referred to as kharu-sie. This would be done in the evening when everybody from the khel had returned from their fields so that nobody would come into contact with the offering. On certain occasions, for instance when the village observed cloistering in which entry of outsiders was prohibited, and when the village wanted to warn others that there was an epidemic, freshly broken branches with green leaves were hung on the kharu and also placed on the path just outside it. The kharu is a venerated object and a code of conduct was followed in accordance with which women were not allowed to slide the head strap of their carrier basket below their forehead or wear their hair tied in a top knot when crossing in front of a kharu.12 It is prohibited to touch the kharu casually, or to touch either the kharu or the trees that have been grown adjacent to it with the traditional knife (dao) as it could lead to illness and trouble by the bad spirits. It is also forbidden to throw stones at it, for this would result in the death of the oldest man of the khel. The kharu/gate has, then, a pivotal role in setting up a series of prohibitions and admonitions around it and spreading outside the homestead or household. This spatial dispersal is taken further in representations of the terhuo-mia spirit principle.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Places Associated with terhuo-mia The name of the place where terhuo-mia are thought to dwell or with which they are in some way associated is generally prefixed or placed before the root term rhuo-mia. Sometimes a place associated with a spirit is given a name which specifies the corresponding relationship. For example, in Jotsoma village an old man narrated the story of a terhuo-mia who was thought to have lived several decades ago in a pond near the village, and was believed to have killed a young woman. The pond was known as Terhuo-zha after the spirit. Near Kigwema village is a hill named Terhuo-sei-kila, meaning ‘spirit wood side’ (sei ‘wood’, kila ‘side’). It refers to the windswept rocky side of the hill which is covered with shrubs. It is held that to hear the sound of crying babies emanating from this hill foretells the death of several people. Certain places around the village and near the fields are said to be thecükerhu, literally, ‘dirty place’ (thecü ‘place’). These are considered unlucky; coming in contact with such a place would invariably lead to illness and, for pregnant women, to miscarriage. I was told that as a precaution and to nullify the effects of such a place, when passing through a patch of land about which one is not sure, a leaf should be plucked, spat on several times and then thrown to the ground, saying ‘I do not know whether this is a thecü-kerhu’.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

63

In almost every village it is common to find rocks and boulders which are associated with either terhuo-mia or a legendary figure. The most famous example is the stone at Khezakenoma which was used for drying paddy by the ancestors of the Angami.13 The cracked stone, about three metres long and two metres wide, is raised on a platform, and was used as a sitting place. In Kigwema village, a rock which is jutting out of the ground in front of the ancestral house of one of my informants is known as Terhuo-tsükhe, meaning ‘where spirits husk rice’; at night people could hear the sound of husking. Even though now the sound is not heard, it is accepted that the spirits have a hold over the rock and any attempt to remove it would result in a thunderstorm. In Rüsoma village, two rocks, believed to be the legendary Sopfünuo and her child, have been cordoned off from the public because merely touching them is thought to set off a thunderstorm. Similarly, in Kidima and Viswema villages there are small rocks which have been completely covered with thorny twigs to avoid their defilement. In Kidima, as mentioned earlier, it is said that when the village was founded a rock fell from the sky and broke into four pieces (which is why there are four major clans in the village); in Viswema the rock so guarded is known as the kemovo-tsü or the priest’s stone (kemovo ‘priest’, ketsü ‘stone’), and it is believed that any harm done to the rock would result in misfortune for the village. The concept of terhuo-mia is thus applied to spirit beings of different kinds, and the term is used generically to refer to non-human being, while often sharing human characteristics. But it is clearly more than a reference to such spirit and non-human agents, for, through locative association, it extends its qualities to places and features of nature such as stone, wood and water. It is in fact a kind of principle of universal animation, by which much that can be seen, heard, felt and experienced has an effect on people. It is perhaps hardly surprising that this powerful principle of animation, which is also that which we translate as spirit, should persist as an overall explanatory system, much as ideas of witchcraft have persisted in Africa alongside new modernities. The principle of animation is indeed core in ‘Angami (and by extension Naga) philosophy’, as repeatedly claimed by a number of my educated Christian Angami informants, for the concepts here discussed address questions of the permeability and transformability of substance, and of the conditions under which such changing matter may affect humans. Glossed as the Angami belief system, they continue to be used to explain moral behaviour and questions of cause and effect irrespective of people’s religious allegiance, whether non-Christian or Christian. In particular, they allude to the sometimes narrow line between human and non-human behaviour, and by implication to issues of culpability and consciousness and their manifestation in the physical and mental body, as disease, illness, bad luck or misfortune. What we may call the Angami concepts of soul and body show further the way in which Christian and animistic ideas mutually readjust in enriching this shared philosophy of practice.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

64

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

From Spirit to Soul Ruopfü is the term which Angami nowadays translate as soul. The suffix pfü, as noted earlier, is a feminine ending. In Angami thought, only human beings and ferocious animals like the big cats, bear and wild boar, possess a ruopfü, and other animals do not (but see Hutton 1921a: 184; and Kirsch 1973: 11). After the death of a person his ruopfü goes to the land of the dead.14 In case the death was sudden (kerucha or kesia-suo; keru, perhaps the same as kerhu ‘dirty’, kesia ‘death’, suo ‘bad’),15 such as by drowning, falling down, or being killed by a wild animal, the soul of a person is thought to hover around as a ghost – it becomes a temi (mi ‘ghost’; the term can be used with different personal pronouns: a-mi ‘my ghost’, nuo-mi ‘your ghost’). Temi is sometimes said to be the same as terhuo-mia; it is said that an individual’s soul turns into a terhuo-mia after death. Interestingly, Hutton (1921a: 185) wrote that the souls of those people who had performed good deeds and followed the rituals and food taboos stringently would go to reside with Ukepenuopfü, and the souls of those who had lost their heads in war would wander between heaven and earth (along with the souls of still-born babies) unless their heads had been replaced at burial with ones made of wood. The souls of the dead, known as kesia-mia ruopfü, are thought to visit their kinsmen in dreams. It may be recalled here that the soul of a person is also said to convert into terhuo-mia upon death. Such souls are said to contact the living through a medium or a necromancer. Some of my informants from Kigwema remarked that the necromancers have a weak ruopfü as it could be overpowered by the souls of the dead, but on the other hand I was told in Kohima and Khonoma that only a person with a powerful ruopfü could withstand such visits by a soul of the dead. Ruopfü translates as ‘spirit’ as well as ‘soul’. Kerhu ruopfü is a bad spirit (kerhu ‘dirty’) who, as mentioned, imparts the secret knowledge of making poison and various charms to those people who come under its influence. Acquiring this kind of knowledge is seen as a negative trait by the Angami and, referring back to earlier discussion, it could be that kerhu ruopfü, and the ruopfü under the influence of a rodo, are not clearly distinguished. Closely connected to ruopfü is the idea of luck. Good luck in Angami is theruo-kevi, a compound of ruopfü and ke-vi (meaning ‘good’; the is a classifier). A-ruo-kevi and u-ruo-kevi respectively stand for ‘my good luck’ and ‘our good luck’. As stated earlier, good luck depends upon which terhuo-mia – rodo or rotshe – are able to influence the ruopfü of a person.16 It is held that at the time of birth these spirits wait to claim the soul of the newly born. It is customary among both the Krüna and Christians for the person who picks up the baby first to put a spittle mark with the forefinger on the forehead of the baby saying, ‘a rie ho’, ‘I am first’ (a ‘I’, rie ‘first’). Angami consider that the given name by which an individual is known can affect his bodily state and the overall personality.17 A child is named immediately after birth so that the bad

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

65

spirits, who are also thought to give a name to the child, are not the first to do so. The Angami have two (or sometimes three) names for an individual, of which the one frequently used by his family becomes the common name. Having two (or more) names is said to prevent the child from ‘leaning’ towards the name which the bad terhuo-mia give him, thus preventing him from growing up with the negative attributes spelt out in that name. It is also believed that a child with a weak or timid ruopfü would fall ill if he were given a name which has a very good meaning; names of children who fall ill frequently or are physically weak are therefore changed (see also Hutton 1921a: 218). Both luck and the personality of a person are, thus, directly related to the terhuo-mia. The Angami term for ‘to live’ or ‘to exist’ is rhei; and, ke-rhei is life. After death (kesia) a person is spoken of as terhuo-rhei, implying a transition from life in this world to life in the other world. It also relates, as mentioned earlier, to the concept that the soul of an individual becomes a terhuo-mia after death. Somewhat related to this is the concept of khrümvü (khrumi in Kigwema dialect). A khrümvü is supposed to be the spirit or apparition which appears immediately after the death of a person (see also Sekhose 1984: 119). The khrümvü looks as well as speaks just like the dead person. The term khrümvü is derived from the Angami term for shadow khrü.18 In Chakro dialect the apparition seen after the death of a person is called puo-ruopfü, literally ‘his/her soul’, and the word for (human) shadow is u-khrümvü. When a person gets startled or very frightened, his shadow is said to have been ‘frightened to death’, as a result of which the person would have a very short life. It is also believed that the ruopfü of a person who is about to die, but has a strong wish to live, would seek help by speaking through another person. The person through whom the soul speaks is known as sanei and is believed to have a strong ruopfü. My Christian informant elaborated the notion by narrating an incident which occurred several years ago in Chumukedima village. He and his brother were playing in a football tournament. Suddenly, in the middle of the game, his brother fell down saying ‘people have beaten me up, please come and save me’. At that moment nobody could understand what he was referring to. After a few minutes he regained his composure and was normal again. However, about half an hour later they received the news that their cook had been beaten up by miscreants and had succumbed to his injuries. It was supposedly the cook’s ruopfü who had asked for help through the brother. The Concept of tekhu-mevi Although a person is normally supposed to have a single ruopfü, it is thought that some individuals have two spirits, one of which roams around in the jungle in the form of a tiger.19 However, some Angami say that a person has only one ruopfü which in certain individuals grows into a tiger; some others believe that the human ruopfü and that of the tiger’s fuse and become one. Such

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

66

A Matter of Belief

a phenomenon as well as the spirit tiger is known as tekhu-mevi,20 literally, growing into a tiger, tekhu ‘tiger’ and mevi ‘to grow’. The spirit tiger can be distinguished from a normal one by its footprints (see also Hutton 1921a: 244 and 1963; he spelt it mavi). The trait could pass on from one person to another by sharing food. A person could also (unknowingly) acquire a tekhu-mevi by eating a crab which had been found lying on its back. The person with tekhu-mevi is said to reflect whatever happens to the spirit tiger. If the tiger falls ill then the person, although otherwise healthy, would also begin to feel ill; when the tiger has eaten, the person also feels as if his stomach is full without actually having eaten anything. I was told in Kigwema village that if someone wants to get rid of his tekhu-mevi, he can do so by performing a ritual which requires him to cut off the head of a jungle rat, place it on two plantain leaves and then feed it to the spirit tiger. In the 1970s a Chakhesang Naga man who came to live in Kigwema village got rid of his tekhu-mevi by performing this ritual. Angami believe that this phenomenon is mostly found among other Naga groups, and that among the Angami it is restricted to those villages which are adjacent to Sumi and Rengma Naga villages. There are several such stories about individuals possessed of tekhu-mevi which illustrate the continuing strength of the belief. Whenever a tiger (or leopard) is killed, invariably someone is reported to have died, either on the same day or a few days later after the appearance of mysterious bullet wounds on his or her body (see also Hutton 1921b: 201–5). It is also said that such people send their tiger spirits as companions in case a friend or relative needs to travel through dense forest. During one of my stays in Nagaland, when a leopard which had accidentally entered the Dimapur Police camp was killed, there were strong rumours of an old man (an Ao Naga) dying mysteriously on the same day. On another occasion, a prominent (Lotha Naga) politician’s death in an accident was linked to an injury caused to a tiger by some of his friends on a hunting trip a couple of weeks beforehand. The rumour was that the politician’s injury resembled that of the tiger’s. The issue became complicated and was talked about in hushed tones, because the dead politician happened to be a practising Christian. There are contradictory claims regarding what happens to the tekhu-mevi once a person converts to Christianity. Some people say that upon conversion the tiger spirit ceases to exist, while others say that even after conversion the spirit double continues to exist. They draw a parallel between the existence of tekhu-mevi and the possession of the body by evil spirits who would be expelled after a person takes on the Christian faith, much as evil spirits were expelled from the bodies of sufferers in the Bible. Therefore, people who continue to have dual souls even after conversion are taken to be only nominal Christians. The phenomenon of tekhu-mevi, however, points to the close relationship between man and the tiger as illustrated in the Angami myth. The tiger is regarded as the elder brother of man. In the jungle Angami always use the term

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

67

‘elder brother’ (udzürieu) when referring to the tiger; it is forbidden (kenyü) to do otherwise as the jungle is held to be the tiger’s territory. After a tiger hunt, the body of the tiger is traditionally kept outside the village.21 The hunter has to follow a sequence of rituals upon his return to the village. On approaching the clan gate, the hunter and other people from the hunting party announce, ‘the elder brother has met with an accident so we are bringing him home’. At the gate the hunter is met by the village priest who tells him, ‘you have killed our elder brother’. Thereafter the hunter crosses the clan gate where an elderly woman from his clan meets him and repeats the statement, to which he replies: ‘yes, I have killed our elder brother’. The woman then throws a handful of soya-bean seeds to the left and right of the hunter, after which he enters his house. He has to observe five days of ritual isolation, which requires him to cook his own food in separate utensils and sleep on a bed made of pounding pestles. At night his peers from the clan fire gunshots in the air and shout the war cry (mekwü) to keep the hunter awake and to frighten the other tigers from coming to the village. The Angami believe that the slain tiger’s companion would look for the person who killed it, to take revenge.22 On the fifth day, the hunter throws the utensils and pounding pestles used by him in the river. This ritual was last performed by a man from the Themoma-khel of Khonoma village in the 1970s. Traditionally, the Krüna would either bury the body of the tiger or throw it away, except for its head which would be kept in the middle of the village stream with its mouth wedged open with a stem of thatch grass so that ‘it could not speak out the name of the hunter’ (see also Hutton 1921a: 262). Eating tiger flesh is tabooed for Krüna (but see Hutton: ibid.). The Christian converts (only men) consume it, but the meat should be cooked and eaten outside the village. In Khonoma village I was told by another man (from Merhema-khel), who had killed a tiger in the1950s, that his Christian friends had eaten the meat of the tiger (outside the village); and although he was a Krüna then, he had used the skin of the tiger to cover his warrior’s shield and the tiger fat for medicinal purposes. We see here that a cluster of concepts that are part of Angami traditional beliefs are common to both Christians and non-Christians. Interestingly, some of these concepts have acquired new meanings because of the use of vernacular terms to replace biblical terms during the translation of the Bible into Angami language. These partly arise from some problems in translation that were faced by the American Baptist missionaries in the early twentieth century, and the subsequent confusion which was generated and is still recognized (by some Angami students of theology) in the new meanings that were associated with these terms. Paradoxically then, while translation mistakes have created divisions, they have also created some meaning overlap which, if anything, has made it possible for some key moral and cosmological assumptions to be shared by both Christians and non-Christians.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

68

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Translation of Some Biblical Concepts The translation of the Bible meant introducing a new set of cosmological ideas using the vernacular terms for concepts which were outside the traditional conceptual universe of the Naga.23 Attempts were made by the missionaries to give new definitions to the old terms. A major problem encountered by them was in translating the term God. There were only two options, either to introduce a loan word or use one of the native terms for Supreme Being. While translating the Bible into Angami, one of the early missionaries among the Angami, Dr Rivenburg, used the term Ihova for God and in doing so, according to Eaton, ‘he failed to distinguish the personal term “God” from the generic term “god”’ (1984: 40).24 Later in 1918, another missionary, Tanquist, brought out a translation of the Book of Revelations in which he translated God as Ukepenuopfü. As I have mentioned earlier, the term is used for the female Supreme Being who is regarded as the ancestress of all beings. The suffix pfü is a feminine termination which Tanquist failed to recognize as such. Hutton had also observed that some Angami had begun to speak of Ukepenuopfü as a male being. To quote him: ‘The conception of Kepenopfü in the Angami mind is at present undergoing a process of change from female to male, and indeed the word is used by Christian converts for their anthropomorphic conception of God the Father’ (1921a: n. 181). The mistake in translation and the ensuing linguistic and theological difficulties that would have been encountered in both the New and Old Testament were later realized by both Rivenburg and Tanquist. Thus they decided to replace Ukepenuopfü with Jihova. Eaton quite appropriately remarks that the converts must have been confused about the perception of the Christian God with these changes (Eaton n.d.: 53–54). Nowadays in the Angami Bible the term Ukepenuopfü is used when referring to God, and the terms Ukepenuopfü and Jihova are used together when referring to the Lord God. The following quotations from the Old and New Testament will illustrate this: Sietse nu Ukepenuopfü teiko mu kiju chüshü. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

(Kerikitho 1:1) (Genesis 1:1)

Sidi Ukepenuopfü Jihova-a themiau zelie di puo khapie Iden zie nu shüshü, puo bu su se baketuo la.

(Kerikitho 2:15)

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

(Genesis 2:15)

Ukepenuopfü Niepu Jisu Khristanuo Puou pezie!

(Pitor 1:3)

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

(Peter 1:3)

As was mentioned earlier, Khonoma village people perceive Ukepenuopfü as a supreme deity which is a combination of both male and female aspects. It

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

69

is possible that this androgynous nature of Ukepenuopfü was recognized during the translation which was undertaken with the help of educated Angami (see chapter 5). However, whenever I asked my informants specifically about the gender of Ukepenuopfü, they would tell me that as pfü is a feminine suffix, therefore the term has feminine connotation. But now it is used for God. The Angami also seem to treat ‘god’ as genderless, as do present-day Christians in the West. However, nowadays the Angami use both Jihova and Ukepenuopfü interchangeably for God the Father. As in Christian circles in other parts of India, Jesus Christ is called Jisu Khrista. Traditionally the Krüna would use the term terhuo-mia to refer to the supernatural entities to whom they offered prayers at various rituals. However, over the years there has been a semantic shift: the term Ukepenuopfü now takes precedence over terhuo-mia and is often used by the diviners when they speak of their talent being a gift from God. The term seems to have become popular because of its use in the Bible, and today both the Christian and nonChristian Angami use it whenever they refer to God or the creator of the world. The early missionary translations presented all terhuo-mia as evil, completely ignoring the fact that the terhuo-mia could be benevolent as well as malevolent. The term terhuo-mia was used to translate the concepts of the devil and Satan. By doing so, they also failed to recognize (or perhaps ignored) the close association of human beings with the spirits in Angami cosmology. Equating terhuo-mia with evil spirits, the missionaries deemed propitiation of terhuo-mia to be equivalent to devil worship. Hutton noted that at the time when he was posted in the Naga Hills, the Angami converts, following the instructions of the missionary, regarded all terhuo-mia as evil, and translated this generic term as ‘satan’. He further commented that, ‘All these “satans” … are, however, very far from having those qualities which we traditionally associate with the Devil, and the qualities of some of them are definitely benevolent’ (Hutton 1921a: 80). Although the Angami Bible now uses the term terhuo-kesuo (‘bad spirits’) for evil spirits and retains the term Satan as it is, the earlier meaning attached to the term terhuo-mia has continued. On several occasions during interviews and casual talk, the Christian Angami translated terhuo-mia as Satan or devil. The confusion over the correct translation of the term terhuo-mia still prevails. In the Angami to English dictionary,25 the term rhuo is explained in Angami as terhuo-mia and its translation in English is ‘god, the spirit worshipped’ (Sekhose 1984: 198). However, elsewhere under the term terhuo-mia (ibid.: 229), the same dictionary gives two meanings of the term: the first is ‘god’ and, the second, is ‘evil spirit’! Further, the word rhuolo is explained as terhuo kesuo (kesuo literally means ‘bad’) and is translated into English as ‘a wicked demon’ (ibid.: 198). As mentioned above, the term terhuo kesuo has been used in the Angami Bible as a substitute for devil and evil spirit. The Angami language does not have separate terms for sacred, holy and evil. Instead, the adjectives kevi, kemesa and kesuo which mean ‘good’, ‘clean’ and ‘bad’ respectively are used in conjunction with other words to convey the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

70

A Matter of Belief

quality of the object. These words have been used to convey the biblical concepts. As the Angami term for spirit, terhuo-mia, had been already used for evil spirits, ruopfü, the term for soul with the prefix kemesa is used to translate Holy Spirit (Kemesa Ruopfü). The Angami term kephouma has been used to translate the Christian/biblical concept of sin. However, kephouma means ‘accursed’, and a kephou-mia is literally ‘a person who with his descendants is trapped in a curse’. The term is used for a big offence such as killing somebody from one’s own clan or village – for which, under the customary law, the person would be expelled from the village for at least seven years. There is a debate among the young Angami theology students over whether this term should be replaced by some other term. My informant, a former student of theology who had been working as headmaster of a primary school in Khonoma, explained that although the idea of expulsion from the village and the continuation of the curse down the family line have parallels with the biblical concepts of original sin, the term still retains the traditional Angami meaning and hence is objected to. This discussion of the Angami pantheon, its cosmology and relationship to Christianity, and its implicit discourse on moral behaviour and the soul, takes us now into an explicit examination of its bodily manifestations, and therefore the aetiology of disease and illness. How are diagnosis and cure represented in this evolving philosophy of practice?

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Angami Dualisms in Concepts of Body, Disease and Illness Anthropologists in recent decades have attacked the use of analytical dualisms as Western epistemological impositions on non-Western peoples. But in some cases, as among the Angami, they are used by the people themselves as a way of identifying and understanding phenomena. In some societies it is unclear whether such dualisms are derived from exposure to Western dualistic classification. Among the Angami, however, the conceptual distinctions appear to pre-date the arrival of missionaries and British colonialists. To take one example, Foster (1976) identified non-Western medical systems as having two principal aetiologies: personalistic (or supernaturalistic) and naturalistic, a distinction later elaborated by Littlewood and Lipsedge (1989). The inseparability of illness, religion and magic is correlated with personalistic aetiologies in which ‘a disease is explained as due to the active, purposeful intervention of an agent, who may be human (a witch or a sorcerer), non-human (a ghost, an ancestor, an evil spirit), or supernatural (a deity or other very powerful being)’. This type of aetiology he distinguishes from the naturalistic type in which ‘religion and magic are largely unrelated to illness’, and disease is thought to stem from ‘such natural sources or conditions as cold, heat, winds, dampness, and above all from an upset in the balance of the basic body elements’ (Foster 1976: 773–75).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

71

The Angami do seek explanation of disease and illness in both naturalistic and personalistic terms, as we shall see. Moreover they also make a conceptual distinction between the physical body and the non-physical soul. Their notions of body and soul are reflected in their understanding of aetiologies of illness and disease, in the semantics of disease names as well as the way dreams are interpreted. The Angami word for body is umo,26 and for soul, ruopfü. The concepts combine in the term thephou (‘person’) in which the root is phou. Phou means generation as well as health, and thus holds the idea that a healthy body leads to healthy descendants. The term is used with different personal pronouns: a-phou, meaning ‘my body and soul’; nuo-phou, ‘your body and soul’; and uphou meaning ‘(our) body and soul’. The distinction between, umo, ruopfü and thephou has always been maintained in the traditional conceptualization and is reflected in the traditional disease aetiology; separation of the ruopfü from thephou causes illness and loss of vigour in the physical body, the umo. Such a loss of vitality and energy disables a person from carrying out daily chores such as working in the field and cutting firewood, and results in a lethargic state of body which is called wishü. Traditionally, a strong, able and alert state of body was required of the warriors who defended their khel and village against enemy attack, as well as of cultivators who did heavy work to clear the forest. Moreover, the former practice of what the British colonial officers called headhunting demanded alertness as well as swiftness of attack. The blessings of terhuo-mia were and are sought for maintenance of a healthy state of the body and mind. The concept of thephou comes into play during the annual festival of Sekrenyi, which is directed towards ensuring good health of the male participants and through them also the prosperity of the whole village during the coming year. The festival is also known as Phousanyü, meaning ‘ritual’ (nanyü) for making the thephou ‘new’ (kesa). During the festival, a day is set aside for the ritual of uphou-mesa (mesa ‘to clean’) in which, symbolically, the physical bodies and the souls of the participants are cleansed with water from the village stream or well. As already noted, in Angami the term phou also stands for generation; thus the concept of a healthy body which would lead to a healthy generation is at the core of the rite of Phousanyü. These distinctions of body and soul and of aetiology set up the basis of illness categories and ideas of well-being. No vi ba mo? ‘Are you well?’ is a common Angami greeting.27 And the answer generally is vi ba mo. Vi means ‘good’ or ‘well’. The opposite of vi is suo which is used for both ‘bad’ and ‘ill’. The two terms are used as suffixes to impart the respective quality to a term. A person’s physique is called ulheulhou – lhou meaning ‘to live’ or ‘to exist’. Ulheulhou-vi and vi ba stand for ‘good health’, while ulheulhou-suo means ‘illhealth’. A person who is always fit and never gets tired is said to enjoy a state of shü rho, or ‘good health’.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

72

A Matter of Belief

Mirroring to some extent the distinction between body and soul, there are hints of that, classically made by Kleinman (1980), between disease, as physically organic disorder, and illness, as the subjective feeling of ‘unwellness’. What we may roughly translate as disease in Angami is kechü-kenü – as kechü means ‘pain’ or ‘discomfort’. Weakness resulting from illness is called thacü; and the expression ulheulhou-thacü more specifically means ‘weak in body’. There is in fact a difference made between falling ill and getting physically hurt. A wound or cut is called ruza and a sore is kechupfe; phe is used for a wound or a sore that becomes worse. In seeking a naturalistic explanation for certain ailments, Angami say that an imbalance of hot and cold inside the body, and excessive perspiration, can cause illnesses. Some skin ailments like eruption of boils (tichü) are linked to the concept of bad blood (thezie suo). Collection of bad blood in the limbs and the back is thought to cause chronic pain. Heavy physical work (work in the fields or carrying paddy and firewood) is said to cause a dislocation of the uterus among women. Abdominal pain is perceived as the dislocation (rudi) of the navel (luo). Excessive consumption of certain foods like chillies, bamboo shoots and rice beer could lead to stomach-ache, or what is commonly held to be a ‘gastric’ problem. A disease which is a result of a previous illness is called thenvü. In identifying personalistic as distinct from naturalistic causes, both Krüna and Christians consider that a disease or illness can be God’s punishment for such wrongdoing as theft, excessive drinking or foul speech. The Krüna, on the other hand, explain illness through a whole range of causes attributed to purposeful agents. Most illnesses can be traced to the action of the terhuo-mia. One variant of the Angami myth of the spirit, the tiger and the man recounts that their old mother was being looked after by them in turn. Whenever it was the spirit’s turn to look after the mother she would become weak; when the tiger stayed with her he would scratch her and tell her which parts of her body he would eat upon her death, but when the man stayed with her he took good care of her. Referring to the myth, one of my informants pointed out that this is why whenever one comes into contact with the spirits or terhuo-mia one feels ill. The main causes of illness cited by Angami are: abduction of the soul by a terhuo-mia; infliction of foreign bodies by terhuo-mia in the shape of pebbles; trouble inflicted by the souls of the dead (kesia-mia mela); and breach of a prohibition or rule while performing a ritual – a case of performative negligence by the ritual actor shading into purposeful intervention or intention (i.e. if s/he had paid attention to the rule, the problem would not have arisen). The first two could happen to anybody when returning from the field or coming back from the forests. The bad terhuo-mia, as was mentioned earlier, are said to throw small stones at the person, and sometimes even beat him up and then take his soul away. It is believed that the abducted soul struggles to get away from the terhuo-mia and only those with strong souls are able to recover from

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

73

such illness. If a house is built on the path which is used by the terhuo-mia then the person to whom the house belongs will fall sick. High palpitation combined with high blood pressure and fever is said to be caused when the soul of a dead kinsman tries to take the soul of a living relative with him. Toothache known as uhu-kechü (uhu ‘teeth’) is caused by a breach of taboo by either the victim or one of his family members – who could be either dead or alive. The violated prohibition can range from accepting food from an enemy, to killing somebody without any particular reason. Dierochü is the illness which may descend upon a person if people talk incessantly about him (die ‘to talk’, chü ‘to be ill’); terharogi is the feeling of being ‘unwell’ attributed to people talking too much about a person’s newly acquired possession (for example a cloth or an animal), thus making him fall sick (see also Hutton 1921a: 234). It is not quite a concept of ‘evil eye’, but in some respects is close. A sickness or death could also be an outcome of sympathetic magic. Traditionally, Angami disposed of hair trimmings in a secret place as it was believed that the hair of an individual could be used in ‘black magic’ and lead to their sickness or even death. For example, a person could take somebody’s hair, wrap it around a stick, and then throw it into a fire, so harming them; or could bury the hair with a dead body which would result in that person’s death. Some decades ago a woman from Kohima village was accused of killing a fellow villager (who she held responsible for her husband’s death) by this method.28 Hutton also noted that the Naga avoided cutting their hair outside their own villages, and that surreptitiously cutting a lock of somebody’s hair, followed by a performance of the ritual for head-taking, could lead to their death (1921a: 166). Interestingly, although there are said to be people who have the knowledge to poison others, I did not come across the concept of ‘witch’, in the sense of a human motivated by envy and psychically able to harm others, although it was recognized that someone could do so under the influence of rodo or bad terhuo-mia. Angami believe that a person who has done wrong can be cursed to death by holding a communal observation of a penyü or a ‘no work day’ by the khel or the village, depending on whether the offence would affect only the khel or the whole village. A ‘no work day’ is customarily observed by the clan on the death of a clan member. Therefore its observation when no one has died is equivalent to wishing the death of the person who committed the offence. During my fieldwork in 1997, the Krüna members of the village had carried out a similar curse on the Christians in Khonoma village. The Christians had begun the harvest of the rice crop in the terrace fields a week before the harvest was ritually opened by the first harvester. The paddy crop in the terrace field should traditionally first be sown by the first sower, known as Tsakro (always a man), and harvested by the first harvester, Lidepfü (always a woman); both have to follow strict ritual isolation before the performance of the ritual. It was for this reason that the Krüna, annoyed with the Christians for breaking the custom, held a Kehi-penyü ‘no work day’, and put the curse of ‘dying soon’ on the Christians.29

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

74

A Matter of Belief

A curse may also be cast on a thief who does not own up to his crime. This is done by performing a ritual called mia-chie which requires piercing an effigy with sharpened bamboo spikes. A mia-chie was carried out against a man from the Tsütsonoma-khel of Kohima village about sixty years ago (just after the Second World War). The man had stolen metal rods which had been bought to build a bridge near the khel’s terrace fields. Although it became known who was behind the theft, the man did not own up. As a consequence the khel elders declared a mia-chie against him: the trunk of a plantain tree was erected and all the men from the khel threw spears made from sharpened bamboo at it, cursing the person to die. The spears were left embedded in the plantain tree for five days and were removed on the fifth day. It is said that the man who had stolen the rods died of severe stomach-ache on the fifth day. It is still common to see sharpened bamboo spikes along with some grass and leaves tied to the top of a bamboo stick, placed on a stack of firewood on the roadside, near trees laden with fruits and in the fields which are close to the state highway, to discourage anyone from stealing. The message given out is that a thief will die in the same way as the grass and leaves drying on the bamboo spike (see also Hutton 1921a: 53; Balfour diary 22 September 1922). The idea that suffering presupposes improper behaviour by the sufferer or by some other agent is evident also in the way in which disease and illness are labelled. As with many societies, the local Angami names for diseases and illnesses, referring to an outstanding feature of the illness, are suggestive of the symptom or specify the underlying cause (Frake 1961; Nichter 1989). As we saw above, the name for abdominal pain (luo-rudi) is derived from what is thought to cause it. The Angami term for goitre is vopho, literally ‘neck swollen’ (vo ‘neck’, pho ‘to expand or swell’), which points to the visible effect of the disease. Malaria is called shü rüki which means intermittent fever (shü ‘gap’, rüki ‘fever’). Epilepsy is called terhuo-vü zie: an analogy is made by the Angami between the jerky movements of the body of a sacrificial cock when it is killed by wringing its neck with bare hands (vüzie; vü ‘cock’, dzie ‘hand’) and those of an epileptic fit; so a person gets an epileptic fit whenever the terhuo-mia wring his neck with their hands.30 Terhuo-dzeithuo refers to somebody behaving abnormally or falling ill after returning from the jungle or field where the terhuo-mia have laid their hands on them (dziethou, literally ‘hand print’). The Angami terms for ‘paralytic stroke’ and ‘to faint’ derive from the verb sia, meaning ‘to die’. Paralytic stroke is la-sia, literally, a side (la) of the body is dead. The term phi-sia (phi ‘to look like’) is used for fainting; literally it means immobility of the body or a condition almost similar to a dead body. Smallpox, believed to be caused by terhuo-mia who ‘sowed the seeds of the disease’, was known as ruoprei because the pox on the body were said to resemble the blisters which appear on the skin of the chicken when it is singed (ruo), and prie referred to the oozing out of water when these are burst. Similarly, measles is ruoda, literally, blisters spread all over da, ‘the body’.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

75

A disease that kills people in large numbers in a short time-span, an epidemic, is called thepe-theru. One which spreads quickly (such as cholera or measles) is called thesa. An epidemic among domestic animals is termed thepethesa. As already noted, in the past to keep an epidemic disease from infecting a village, green leaves were strewn on the village path just outside the kharu with appeals to the spirits not to visit the village. Angami stories of epidemics often trace their cause to the anger of terhuomia occasioned by the breaking of a taboo or violation of a ritual (natsei-narü). One of my informants said that when people do not follow the rules,31 the terhuo-mia send epidemics ‘to teach them a lesson’. As mentioned earlier, it is believed that the bad terhuo-mia, called rodo, can be heard making noises before an epidemic strikes a village. There are several legends regarding thepe. An often-told legend illustrating the bad outcome of performing a fake or mock ritual is of an epidemic in a village called Seirhima.32 The people of this village had a tradition of giving communal feasts as a part of death rituals. For quite some time there had been no deaths in the village, and people were getting impatient for a communal feast. A solution was thought of: a wooden human figure was made and its head was cut off. After this a big community feast was arranged. However, a few days after the act the whole village was swept by an epidemic which was attributed to the anger of terhuo-mia at the audacity of the villagers for performing the rituals and feasting after faking a death. Incidentally, the name Seirhima means wooden-figure village (sei ‘wood’; rhi ‘image’; and ma is a suffix meaning ‘people of’). It is quite possible that the feast mentioned in the legend refers to that held after a successful headhunting raid. In the past when the warriors brought in the human head trophies to the khel or village the rituals culminated in a grand feast. The terms natsei and narü are used for any incorrect performance of a ritual or violation of a taboo. Natsei specifically means deviation from the correct way. Na relates to nanyü, and tsie means ‘deviation from proper way’. All family members are required to be present at the time of the performance of rituals; if even one member of the family is away and the family performs the full ritual it would be considered a natsei. Using a leaf which is different from the one prescribed for a ritual is also a natsei. Traditionally a number of food taboos were observed by the giver of the ‘feasts of merit’, and it is held that if these were not observed then the person, as a result of the anger of the terhuo-mia, would become dumb and mentally unstable (kemelo) or even die. However, when a rule is broken but judged to be through no fault of the performer of the ritual, it is called a narü, as it is thought to lead to a ‘dilution or thinning’ (rü) of the efficacy of the ritual. For example, if a household is observing a ritual prohibition in which nobody is supposed to enter their house, and somebody, unknowingly, breaks that rule, then this would be held as a narü. Nacü, on the other hand, means a ritual which has been properly performed; cü relates to the word me-cü, meaning ‘clear or pure’. These

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

76

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

concepts are also held by the Christian Angami, and on one occasion the term narü was used by the Angami elders at a funeral in Delhi when the dead body was brought inside the church (an act which is against the funerary custom followed in Nagaland). It is held that misfortune will befall anyone who violates a ritual. In being open to variable interpretation, these terms allow for judgements to be made as to whether a ritual was intentionally, negligently or properly performed, and so become part of the moral profiles that people make of each other, sometimes competitively. The possibilities are reminiscent of a case described by Bowen of a Muslim cleric’s slip of the tongue in reciting a prayer being condemned as evidence of his impiety and religious insincerity (Bowen 2000). The theme of moral reckoning is a significant aspect of Angami dream interpretation, which, as has been documented in other studies, is often a means to predict what the future holds for a person or for the village (Tedlock 1987; Holy 1992; Herdt 1987). Just as there are good and bad spirits, the Angami place great significance on a distinction between good and bad dreams in everyday life. They read omens from dreams before undertaking any important task, a practice known as mhonyü. It is resorted to before finalizing a marriage, before selecting a tree for constructing the khel gate, before selecting land for cultivation, and on other occasions seeking a vision of the future. It is in dreams that diviners are contacted by tutelary spirits or by the dead wishing to contact kinsmen or reveal their desires. It is also in dreams that various medicinal plants are revealed to both diviners and herbalists. However, this does not mean that dreams are always taken at face value nor, according to an Angami folk-tale, do good dreams necessarily predict a good future. The story concerns a girl who was betrothed to a warrior from another village. A long time ago a girl named Mehouviu was betrothed to a warrior named Morsa from another Angami village, Kidima. She had a dream that she was in her husband’s village and was eating a big meal. Her parents took the dream as a good omen which predicted prosperity of her future household. A few days later there was a headhunting raid in which the Kidima warrior, Morsa, unknowingly cut off Mehouviu’s head. He did not know that he had been engaged to her as they had not met. After he reached his village he gave a big feast. Mehouviu’s parents, wanting to know what had happened to their daughter, contacted a diviner. The daughter’s soul told the diviner what had happened, and this way everyone came to know that she had been killed by her own fiancé.

Dreams in Angami are generally known as umho; there are ‘good dreams’ (mho-vi) and ‘bad dreams’ (mho-suo) which reveal omens about future events concerned with hunting, warfare, birth, death, illness and so on. Mho-suo are the dreams which foretell illnesses of epidemic proportions descending on the village or in which the dreamer sees death and funeral ceremonies. However, recurrent bad dreams are a cause of concern, and which require the performance of certain rituals to get rid of them. It is only when these fail to have the desired

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

77

effect that a diviner (themu-mia) is consulted. We will discuss the rituals that are performed to cure recurring bad dreams in the following chapter. Dreams, especially bad dreams, are taken seriously and one of the parting greetings in the villages is mho vi le, wishing the person good dreams, as ill luck and bad dreams go together. While it is true that people occasionally question the predictive power of dreams, they are taken seriously, especially bad dreams. Or, someone will report to friends and relatives having had a bad dream the night before, and will be emotionally affected by it throughout the day. They discuss it, worrying whether they should caution a person figuring in the dream, or, should they themselves be adversely featured, taking care not to fall victim to the dream’s narrative. This anxiety is a persisting aspect of Naga selfreflection and interpersonal empathy. Thus, Hutton vividly records the case of one of his assistants (dobashi) who saw another dobashi, named Zelucha, who had also been assistant to Hutton, in a dream wearing new clothes, worried about the ill-omen implied, and then discovered that Zelucha had died (Hutton 1921a: 247). The man’s interpretation of the dream makes sense in view of the fact that new cloth is placed over a dead body for burial, and women’s church groups put aside new cloth which can be donated to those too poor to afford them for burials of their loved ones. This interpretive significance of dreams affects Christians and non-Christians alike, who may all seek relief from their possible effects through ritual. It should be noted in this respect how at least one anonymous Naga commentator sees dreams as enabling direct communication with God to the extent in fact of obviating the need for Christian rituals and yet remaining Christian. He/she says, ‘Now I, like many Naga, am a Christian, but I am not a European. I have a relationship with my God. Now my God can speak to me through my dreams, just as happened to my Angami ancestors. I don’t have to be like the Anglicans or the Catholics and go through all those rituals. I don’t need them. What I am talking about is Naga Christianity – an indigenous Naga Christianity’ (IWGIA 1986: 107). We see, then, that a number of religious and ritual concepts are common to both Krüna and Christian, especially those concerning spirit and non-spirit beings such as rodo, rotshe, Miawenuo and Chükheo, and the concepts of soul (ruopfü) and tiger-spirit (tekhu-mevi), and of dreams. These concepts are also reflected in Angami disease aetiology, for example when Angami speak of epidemics as resulting from improperly performed rituals or violated prohibitions. These conjoined ideas of individual spirit, body, soul, vulnerability and the moral person are expressed in Angami life-cycle rituals, which form the subject of the following chapter, where the focus is on those performed to cure afflictions, and on the annual festival of Sekrenyi.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

78

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. In the human class feminine gender is marked by pfü and nu; typically human masculine is unmarked, but in a limited number of words pfu marks human masculine. In the non-human category, feminine is marked by krü and masculine is expressed by four different suffixes. Exceptions are cat and dog – cat has human gender markers, and dog has a human masculine suffix (Giridhar 1980: 23–26). 2. The myth presenting the tiger as the elder brother of man is shared by the Chakhesang, Lotha, Sema (Sumi) and Rengma Naga (Hutton 1921a: 262) not to mention the Thulung Rai (see, for example, Allen 1980). There are several variations of the myth. 3. The prefix ke- is used for making certain verbs into nouns and to form adjectives (Giridhar 1980: 55). 4. The word kerhu is also used for menstruation. 5. Near Chumukedima village I came across a case of a young woman from a Christian family who was thought to have been taken over by a bad spirit (terhuo-kesuo). The spirit was described by her as ‘dark, frightening and with horns’. The woman looked unkempt, unwashed and in a dishevelled state. The woman had been a class fellow of my friend who interpreted for me. We will take up the case in chapter 7. 6. Such an oath is resorted to by both Krüna and Christian Angami (as well as by other Naga). 7. Backward pointing feet are very common in female demons, such as churail in the north Indian folklore. 8. On the behest of my host in Khonoma, I photographed the face in the rock using the telescopic setting in the video camera. The recording generated much interest among his wife and her friends. I was later told that the Hindu soldiers at the Assam Rifles camp site near the hill have begun to worship the rock as a representation of the Hindu god Shiva.. 9. In Khonoma village it is said to be the name of a mythical crane which is supposed to be so huge that seven strong men are required to lift one of its feathers. 10. In the past on certain days of the year it was prohibited to hunt or fish; the prohibition was called Khunuo penyü (khunuo ‘animals’, penyü ‘ritual prohibition’). As a ‘modern’ rationalization of an old taboo, an educated Christian Angami remarked that these prohibitions were meant to put a stop to hunting during the mating season of different animals and added that because nowadays nobody follows these old rules very few animals are left in the jungle. 11. Hutton (1921a: 182) mentions Metsimo, calling it a sort of Angami St Peter who guards the approach to paradise. 12. Interestingly, in the past, a woman, who for some reason had remained unmarried and was desirous of acquiring the status of a married woman (which would then allow her to grow her hair), could perform a symbolic marriage to the kharu. For this she would carry food and some rice beer in her ceremonial basket (khophi) to the kharu. Upon reaching there she would say to the kharu, ‘I have come to marry you’, and then sit down, eat the food, drink the rice beer and return to the village. After this she could grow her hair long. I was told that although men would not approach her, she would always be talked about as the one who did not have a husband. Marriages to inanimate objects have been reported in anthropological literature on some South Asian communities such as the Newar of Nepal, some castes in South India (Dumont 1964, 1972), Chinda, Chaukhutia Bhunjia and Rajgonds of Central India (Dube 1953). See also Parkin (1997). 13. See chapter 1, and figures 1.2 and 1.3. 14. The Angami tell a myth of a comet called Dzüdu mikhu, literally ‘Dzüdu’s smoke’. A man named Dzüdu came back with his coffin from the world of the dead. People on the earth told him that there was no place on the earth for the dead so he should go back. The man told them that he would go back, but after every seventh generation he would send a smoke signal from the sky to tell everyone that he lives up there. So once every seventy years we see the smoke sent by him. (My informant said that this was the story of Halley’s comet; see also Hutton 1921a: 413.)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Classifying Spirit and Sickness

79

15. For such a death, Hutton (1921a: 229) gives the term sesho cf. siasuo, literally, bad death (sia ‘to die’; suo ‘bad’). The concept of bad death is common among the Naga (see Hutton 1921b: 262; Mills 1922: 283–85; 1926: 160–62; 1937: 221–22), and throughout most of eastern Eurasia (for example, see Metcalf 1982: 254–57; Bloch and Parry 1982). The concept refers to a life which has been cut short suddenly; as Parkin (1985: 7) drawing on Metcalf (ibid.) suggests, it refers to ‘human exit that was ill-timed and so failed to satisfy the normal expectations associated with natural death’. See also chapter 3. 16. Interestingly, finding the term a bit confusing Hutton mentioned ruopfü (he spelt it rhopfü) as a female spirit ‘attached to each man or to men in general … a mysterious spiritual force which seems to combine the attributes of guardian angel, familiar spirit, Destiny, and in some cases it would seem even of man’s own soul’ (1921a: 183). 17. A similar notion is found among the Penan; see Needham (1971). 18. The term for one’s reflection in the mirror is u-khrü. 19. Tiger symbolism is widespread in South-East Asia, see Wessing 1986. 20. A similar concept exists among other Naga: the Sumi call such people anghuu-kuhulhomi which means ‘tiger-form’ (or angshu amiki, meaning ‘to wander’ – Hutton 1921b: 201); the Ao term is tanela-ki meaning ‘soul tiger’ (see also Mills 1926: 247); the Yimchungrü call them khuzumae-rü, literally ‘tiger spirit people’; the Khiamniungan term is khao-un, ‘tiger soul’ (see also Mills 1922: 165; 1937: 228; and Hutton 1921c). See also Joshi (2004), Joshi [Patel] (1994), Ovesen (1983) and Sutter (2008) on the concept of soul and tiger spirit among the Ao and the Chang Naga. 21. The Naga groups of northern Nagaland do not have the myth of the spirit, the tiger and the man. These Naga equate the killing of a tiger with the taking of enemy heads; although they bring the body of the tiger inside the village, only some groups consume the flesh of the tiger (see also Mills 1926: 140). 22. See also Hutton 1921b: 201–2; and Mills 1922: 66–67; 1926: 140; 1937: 98. 23. Rafael (1993), in his seminal historical work on Tagalog, questions the translation process of the Bible from Latin to Spanish to Tagalong, and the authenticity of the representations. Meyer (1999) discusses the implications of translation of the concept of the Devil among the Ewe in Ghana. 24. Eaton (1984, 1997), applying Horton’s (1971) theory of African conversions, writes that conversion among the Naga likewise followed the replacement of the ‘High God’ with the Christian concept of God. He explains that Naga groups converted at differing paces due to the differences in their social organization, and the way in which indigenous terms were used to translate Biblical concepts. Eaton bases his analysis on seven correlates of conversion, an approach which may well provide insights. One concern, however, is that Eaton takes too unquestioningly the missionaries’ view that the Naga had a notion of a High God, as distinct from a creative force, before missionary contact. Also, contrary to his view that the Angami did not migrate (a major factor in his correlative analysis), they did expand, like the Ao and Sumi, through migration and the settlement of new villages as well as practising shifting swidden cultivation with wet terrace farming, and were very much engaged in trading relationships with other Naga and the Assamese. Moreover, in placing emphasis on the primary influence of pre-existing Naga cosmology in determining the nature and direction of conversion to Christianity, he gives less credit to the availability in churches of educational, healing and other material resources and their influence in shaping peoples’ varying choices in conversion and (changing) sect affiliation in the wider changing political environment. The mission records themselves emphasize the importance of educational and medical work in conversion which can still be seen in Nagaland. In part explanation of our differences, it might be noted that while Eaton relies upon secondary sources, my data combine secondary sources with primary data derived from extensive fieldwork over a period from 1990 until the present time, and which has included lengthy life histories. 25. It was the only Angami to English dictionary available at the time of fieldwork. However, it was not published by the Ura Academy which is the official body concerned with the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

80

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

development of Angami (or Tenyidie) language and publication of Angami literature. The academy has published a voluminous official dictionary of Tenyidie in the Tenyidie language. U- is first person plural possessive pronoun and is used as classifier with human substantives (Giridhar 1980: 21). The personal pronoun is suffixed to mo to form words: a-mo ‘my body’; puo-mo ‘his/her body’; themia-mo ‘man’s body’. I was told by my friends that I should not direct this question to old women in the villages as they would give me a long list of ailments which troubled them! My respondent, an elderly woman (Catholic) said that she was uncomfortable talking about magic because people might believe that it is still being practised. Moreover, she was worried that people might begin practising such magic. When I had gone to interview some Krüna elders in the village two days after the penyü, they were suspicious that the Christian villagers from the other khel, where I was staying, might have sent me to gather information on their intentions. However, one of my informants said that epilepsy is the result of one or more terhuo-mia beating a person. Ziejümo or ziezhümo is the term used for individuals ‘who do not live according to rules’. There are variations of the legend; according to one this happened at Mima village.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

31. 32.

A Matter of Belief

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Chapter 3

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

RELIGION OF PRACTICE

It is significant that the term nanyü is translated by English-speaking Angami as both religion and ritual, this latter being its primary and pre-Christian sense.1 We can say therefore that the Angami animistic pantheon described as moral discourse in the previous chapter is demonstrably a religion of practice in its focus on ritual activity. This is not to say that it excludes meditation on abstract moral concepts or on personal dilemmas of life and death. Indeed, the Angami I have spoken to claim to be the philosophers among the Naga, and say that such ‘inner’ thoughts are both experienced, shared and expressed through the routinized and collective performances of ritual, which provide the dramatic and emotional conditions highlighting common interpretations of the purpose and effects of particular rites. It is significant also that, since the situation described by Hutton three or so generations ago, personal rituals concerned with the self-treatment of illness have declined, while those of a collective nature have persisted. As an explanation of such decline, it may be that such self-treatment has been taken up by the availability of individual biomedical provision and that the ritualized aspects of such personal treatment are now covered by the possibility offered by Christianity for privatized worship alongside congregational. The existential concerns of animistic religion, however, remain important and coexist with Christianity’s often more explicit offerings of empathy, salvation, guidance and admonition. Angami animism, and perhaps animism generally, points up humanity’s quandaries through implicit themes more than explicit liturgy. For instance, it includes within its ritual actions various references to village or other social boundaries, to life-cycle crises, to the responsibility of an individual for the effects of his/her behaviour on his group, to the problems of having to subsist in uncertain and capricious terrain and weather, to questions of who should be included and who excluded from the village, and to the ever-present threats of predation by others. It is not surprising the Angami village has remained the core social unit, constituted by its clans and khel, and marked by the kharu gate, for its boundaries, and sometimes even those of a constituent khel, represent the limits beyond which a relatively safe world ceases. This was so traditionally, when headhunting was practised, and is so nowadays, or is often presumed to be so, through fear of the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

82

A Matter of Belief

consequences of being caught up in the violence of the competing factions fighting for Naga autonomy or independence. The conduct of Angami rituals turns, therefore, on rules and prohibitions relating to leaving or not leaving the village boundaries; adopting certain spatially acceptable positions and movements in or about the village home; excluding or ‘cloistering’ certain categories of people; burying the dead inside or outside the village depending on the nature of the death; making sure a new mother and her child ‘come out’ in the proper way or making special provision for those who die in pregnancy or before birth; and eating or not eating certain foods (themselves often emanating at some point from outside the home). These themes of internal, external and other forms of spatiality and movement give a kind of tangible structure to the anxieties inevitably felt by people living in a society whose egalitarianism often produces violent rivalry and competitiveness. Rule-governed structures may sometimes be irksome but they can provide the reassurance of apparent regularity. The ritually reiterated boundaries of space and movement give people some notion of which are and which are not safe to cross, without being explicit as to what a particular transgression may lead to, but conveying more generally that rituals must be carried out as prescribed, lest misfortune occur. This view of ritual as the implicit warning of the dangers of transgressing the boundaries of territory or of behavioural rules thus merely differs in emphasis from those views which see ritual as asserting authority and constructing power relations (Bloch 1986; Thornton 1980, 1982; Snyder 1997; Parkin 1996); as moving people from one stage to another (Turner 1967, following van Gennep 1909); and as to how ritual and non-ritual activities can be defined or differentiated (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Bell 1992. See also Goody 1977; Parkin 1991, 1992; Coppett 1992). Seeing ritual among the Angami in this way, as reminding people of the importance of rules in an otherwise non-centralized and even partly anarchic society, explains their persistence both in the forms in which Hutton described them three generations ago and as adaptations to modernity and accommodations with Christianity. Indeed, in order to understand the significance of Angami rites even today, it will be necessary for me to describe them in detail both to reveal their complexity as commentaries on and responses to different human conditions, and to show their adaptability over time. Let me first analyse the various terms employed by the Angami when speaking of rituals and rites, and then discuss the life-cycle rituals which give us an insight into the Krüna and Christian Angami practices, and how some of them have crossed over from one belief system to another. Thereafter I will explore how the practices and beliefs regarding the aetiology of sickness are reflected in the personal rituals that are performed by the Angami to alleviate sicknesses. I will analyse the rituals largely in terms of spatialized ‘rites of passage’, which as Parkin (1992: 16) suggests, ‘presuppose phasal movement, directionality, and positioning’ making use of ‘axes, cardinal points, concentric

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice

83

zones, and other expressions of spatial orientation and movement’. Lastly I analyse the communal ritual of Sekrenyi, which, as we shall see, directly brings together concern with the health of the individual with that of Angami society as a whole.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Angami Ritual Terms As well as being translated as the term for both ritual and religion, nanyü is also used for addressing the Krüna-nanyü, the followers of animism. During interviews and in casual conversation the word nanyü was translated several times as puja, ¯ the nearest Hindi equivalent to the English word ‘ritual’, to convey the sense to me of its basis in action. A nanyü is performed on a variety of occasions, which could range from an illness to the calendrical festivals. These can be put under different categories of rites of passage: calendrical, which are performed in accordance with the agricultural cycle; life crisis rituals, which are performed at birth, marriage and death; and rites of affliction, performed for contingencies such as illnesses. A nanyü may require an imposition of certain prohibitions on the person or the social unit – a family, a clan, a khel or the whole village – that is performing it. The terms kenyü and penyü refer to the kinds of prohibition employed on such occasions. The connection between the prohibitions and nanyü was explained by one of my informants when he said that certain kenyü and penyü have to be observed during the performance of a nanyü, and not doing so would invalidate the performance of the ritual. Penyü refers to prohibitions and rules which restrict or direct the physical movement of members of the social unit – the family, clan, khel or village – to which it is applied. Such prohibitions and admonitions, as we shall see, are observed at the time of a funeral, during the performance of some illnessrelated rituals, epidemics and at calendrical rituals and festivals, during which those observing a penyü are not supposed to interact with outsiders, or leave their house or the village. During certain rites, the presence of women is kenyü. This meant that I myself was not permitted to observe the performance of rituals and had also to postpone visits to villages when the ‘no interaction with outsider’ period was being observed by the Krüna. This practice of isolation is labelled ‘cloistering’ in the anthropological literature (see Macdonald 1975: 81–102) and is found among other Naga groups, and among several communities in the states neighbouring Nagaland as well as in South-East Asia. Kenyü also has the sense of referring to ‘that which is taboo or forbidden’, and is used to denote certain acts. For example, for women to step over men’s articles is kenyü as this would make men unsuccessful in hunting; eating certain birds and animals is kenyü as they are supposed to shorten the life of whoever eats them;2 eating certain foods and combinations of foods (which are otherwise eaten) are kenyü to the performer of the zhatho (feast of merit) ritual; it is kenyü

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

84

A Matter of Belief

for unmarried Krüna girls to grow their hair long. Sometimes the ritual isolation imposed on an individual or his family may also be spoken of as kenyü. Connoting a more collective dimension, thenyi is the term used for festivals or the calendrical rituals in which the whole village participates. The festivals of Thekrenyi, Terhenyi and Sekrenyi are major calendrical rituals which are observed before the transplantation of paddy saplings, after the harvest of the paddy and at the beginning of the Angami New Year, respectively. Thenyi is contrasted with thehe (or thiehe) which is explained as a communal feast that is not accompanied by any religious ceremony or ritual. The terms nanyü, kenyü, penyü and thenyi are commonly grouped together under the noun genna, which is used in the lingua franca ‘Nagamese’. The term was used in early tour reports and gazetteers and came to be employed, as Gurdon (1914: 159) noted, ‘when speaking of taboos amongst the hill tribes of this (Assam) province’. Although recognized as a term which had its origin in the Naga Hills, it was also used by ethnographers writing on the Khasi, Kuki, Garo and Lushai of Assam. Hutton (1921a: 190) suggested that the word is a derivation from the Angami kenna,3 meaning ‘forbidden’, and had ‘become regularly used in the Naga Hills for the various incidents of a magico-religious rite’ for want of a ‘suitable English word which describes them’. He also noted that in casual speech three terms – penna, kenna, and nanyü – were ‘lumped together under the expression genna’ (ibid.). Hutton recognized the difference in the usage of these three terms, but preferred to use genna and kenna to denote rites and prohibition in the rest of the monograph. Besides Hutton, the term genna was also used by Hodson, Mills and FürerHaimendorf in their writings interchangeably with the vernacular terms for ‘ritual’, ‘prohibition’ and ‘festival’, which were used by the particular Naga groups they had studied. However, it is possible that because these ethnographers spoke to their informants in Nagamese, it encouraged the informants to use the term genna more frequently to make themselves understood, and that this in turn influenced the use of the term by ethnographers. Also, in the anthropological writings on cloistering that used Naga ethnographic material, the word genna became ‘standardized’.4 Nowadays, genna is used by all the Naga groups in place of their respective vernacular terms when conversing in Nagamese with outsiders or with the other Naga. However, this does not mean that the vernacular terms are no longer used – far from it. During all my interviews, my informants would use genna in a very general way, more to make their point understood. So, although they would say, ‘today is genna to work in the field’ or ‘Sekrenyi is a genna’, it was more by way of explaining the situation to me in simple terms because they would then go on to say, ‘today we are observing such and such penyü’ or ‘today it is kenyü to do this’. The terms nanyü, kenyü, penyü and thenyi were therefore frequently used when describing the rituals, not just in Angami but in Nagamese. When I asked specifically about the use of the term genna, my informants were very clear that they used it to translate the native terms and that it is not an Angami,

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice

85

but a Nagamese term. In the following text I use the Angami terms instead of genna because, in my understanding, they seem to convey the meaning more accurately. It has been suggested by some authors that the observation of the Sabbath by the Naga Christian converts could be equated with the traditional ‘no work days’ or genna (penyü) days (see Downs 1992: 168–69); it was easy to introduce the concept of Sabbath because such a system already existed in the traditional set up.5 Downs illustrates this by narrating incidents of devout Christian converts who would not undertake travel on a Sunday, even for an evangelical purpose, or would do so only after midnight. He mentions that on a Sunday the new converts did not go to their fields, and also abstained from activities like weaving and making baskets and spears. Although to a certain extent one could say that the Sabbath imitated some of the restrictions of the traditional days of penyü, in actuality it imposed extra restrictions. On traditional ‘no work days’, only movement outside the village was and is prohibited so that all activities requiring one to go outside the village are suspended; but other activities like weaving and basketry continue to take place. On Sundays regulated by Christianity, however, almost everything comes to a grinding halt in Nagaland. No buses or taxis run except for those owned by non-Naga, and even these services are skeletal. The local markets are closed except for the small grocery, tobacco and betel-nut shops that are run by non-Naga, and even these are kept open at ‘half-shutter’. Sunday mornings in the villages are taken up by going to the church, though it would be incorrect to say that church attendance is 100 per cent. That said, the restriction on movement out of the village is not always followed strictly. During fieldwork, I found that it was the best day to interview Christian villagers, comparing well with the Krüna days of penyü (days on which interaction with outsiders is acceptable), when I would find Krüna villagers relaxing in their village. This contrasts with other days when most villagers spend the daytime cultivating, while those engaged in commerce or employed in government or private sector jobs are away during daylight hours, thus making interviews difficult. Noting, then, the persisting importance of using traditional Angami terms to classify rituals, let me show how they can also be seen as making up a kind of morphological progression from the personal or small group to those that are set within the larger group who participate in the Sekrenyi New Year rite. We can start with some examples of individual rites of passage concerning birth and death, and with those to do with illness, and show how the communal ritual of Sekrenyi can be regarded as an annual culmination and consolidation of ritual participation. It is a progression from the personal or small group to the wider collectivity that is paradigmatic of many other developments in the history of Angami and Naga generally, as they cope with individual problems on the one hand and yet are increasingly embraced by the demands of Christian congregations and political organizations on the other.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

86

A Matter of Belief

Rites of Passage In noting, after van Gennep (1909), that rites of passage mark a stage of transition through movement from one social status to another, Leach suggests that ‘the occupancy of each status constitutes a period of social time of social duration, but the ritual which marks the transition – puberty rite, wedding, funeral, healing ritual – is an interval of social timelessness’ (Leach 1976: 43; see also Leach 1968). In following this process in which, after childbirth and death, Angami ritual participants are secluded, go through a liminal period and then emerge out of it to be reincorporated into normal social life, we see a repeated theme: of warning and admonition against a promise of security that is conditional on proper behaviour.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Pregnancy and Birth There are different ways of talking about the state of pregnancy. To be pregnant is nuoneipfü kelie, the term deriving from nuo (child) and kelie (to receive), and meaning ‘she is with a child’. Another term often used is nuotoupfü kelie which refers to conception as in ‘she has conceived’; and, relating to another life growing inside the womb (nuonibou). The state of being pregnant is also referred to as urübei mo kecü, meaning ‘she is not alone/single’ (rübei ‘alone/ single’, mo ‘not’). A woman would speak of her state of pregnancy by saying: a nuotoupfü ba te (I have conceived); a urübei mo ba te (I am not single); and, speaking of the stage of her pregnancy, a thekhrü kenyie ba te (I am two months [pregnant]; thekhrü ‘month’, kenyie ‘two’).6 A pregnant woman should keep away from the banyan tree and avoid coming into contact with those places known as thechü kerhu, (‘bad places’, see chapter 2) as this could lead to a miscarriage (nuokra-nuokrü, ‘child fall-out’). Twins, although rare, are considered auspicious; they are taken as a symbol of plenty – as a doubling up of everything; the term nuobi used for twins literally means ‘two children at the same time’ (nuo ‘child’, ke-bi ‘to carry or do two things simultaneously’).7 Traditionally the Angami believed that the birth of male twins symbolized victory in war, and of female twins a plentiful harvest. An elderly healer in Jotsoma village reminisced that at the time of the Second World War there were a pair of twin boys in the village, who were two age-sets younger than him. Due to the belief in the auspicious nature of the male twins, the British troops positioned near the village used to give gifts of food to the twins to keep them happy and well fed. The process of childbirth is called penuo or nuoze, literally, ‘to give birth’.8 It must be noted that the verb penuo also occurs within the Angami term for their supreme being, Ukepenuopfü (U-ke-penuo-pfü meaning ‘one who gave birth to us’; see chapter 2). Unlike in some communities such as the Dinka, who have separate verbs for creation by the divinity and for men begetting children (Lienhardt 1961: 39), the Angami use the same verb in both contexts.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice

87

The delivery is generally done by an older, more experienced woman (who may or may not be a traditional healer or masseuse) or by a dai – a trained midwife employed at the primary healthcare centre in the village. The woman helping in the delivery might be assisted by somebody from the family or alternatively she may bring an assistant with her. One of my interpreters, who later became a friend, had been an assistant to a young woman from her clan who was often called upon for deliveries. The women who are actively engaged in cultivation may carry on working until the very last stages of pregnancy, some even giving birth in the field without any assistance from another person.9 They are considered to be physically much stronger compared to those who have taken up other activities such as teaching, or a job in the state government office.10 The midwives and traditional masseuses are considered to be efficient in delivering breach cases. In Khonoma village most deliveries have been carried out by two women herbalists cum masseuses, and the rest by midwives at the primary healthcare centre. In fact one of the herbalists from Semoma-khel, named Üleiü, had delivered almost 90 per cent of the children in her khel (see chapter 4). In Chumukedima village, to ease the process of birthing for women in labour but having difficulty in delivery, an egg is rolled on the swollen belly, saying, ‘like the smooth rolling down of the egg, let the child also come out’. The process is called nuoze-ruotho, and was explained as a ‘birth magic’; my interpreter used the Hindi word j¯adu to convey the meaning. In home deliveries – among both the Christians and Krüna – the umbilical cord is cut with a bamboo knife (rieprei; kerie ‘bamboo’). The placenta (ulha) is always buried inside the house, ideally under the mother’s bed or near the hearth; it could be buried elsewhere in the house if the main room has a cemented floor. Even when the delivery takes place in hospital, the placenta is brought back to be buried inside the house. It is said to be a kenyü for both the Christians and Krüna Angami to do otherwise. The reason given was that if it is thrown here and there or is buried outside the house, the dogs would eat it up. As mentioned in chapter 2, among both Christians and Krüna the first person to hold the newborn says ‘I am the first one’ and applies a spittle mark on the forehead of the child to prevent evil spirits harming or influencing the child. There are a series of rituals which are performed only by the Krüna after childbirth and which vary between villages. As nanyü, they prescribe isolation of the mother and child who, for the first four days after childbirth are considered to be contagious and especially harmful to hunters, who should avoid contact to the extent of not even setting eyes on the mother during this period lest bad luck befall them. Only after performance of these rituals may mother and child come out of the state of isolation. The five-day period after childbirth is said to be nuobozhü, explained as ‘what is proper to do after birth’. During this period the mother is kenyü and is supposed to avoid being seen by anyone outside her immediate family. Although she does not stay in a separate room in the house, she is confined to

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

88

A Matter of Belief

a separate space within the main living room. She sleeps on the floor, on a bamboo mat (zopie) instead of on her bed. She cooks her food in separate utensils on a separate fireplace. Should she be physically too weak to cook for herself then her husband may do so but would also have to follow the rule of separation, including eating separately from the rest of the family. During nuobozhü the mother should not step outside the house except to relieve herself and for the performance of certain rituals, and even for these she should use the back door. The mother may be given chicken soup (thevü-dzü; thevü ‘chicken’, dzü ‘water’) and some warm rohi or rice beer to replenish her energy and bring back her strength. If she belongs to a rich family she may carry on with this diet for as long as possible. One of my elderly informants commented that in earlier times the mother was allowed to eat only chicken for some days following the delivery, but that nowadays there is no prohibition on what the mother may eat.11 In her opinion, the traditional diet helped the mother regain her strength rapidly. On the first day after childbirth, nuobou nanyü is performed: a hen is killed and cooked by the mother (or the father, if the mother is very weak). Only the mother is allowed to eat this food, which she may finish over the next three days; sharing it with other members of the family is kenyü. Breaking this taboo by sharing the food with her children is said to result in sotsa, meaning ‘hatred for each other’ among the children. There is no ritual remedy for this because it is a result of breaking the birth kenyü, and is therefore natsei (see chapter 2). On the fourth day, the mother goes to the pond to bring water and on her way back plucks the leaves of a grass called zhohe (or tsowhe). These leaves are used for only this nanyü; their use for any other purpose is kenyü. In Kohima, large leaves are plucked for a female child and small ones for a male. The mother puts a leaf around the right hand wrist of the child and then snaps it into two while saying a blessing. In Khonoma, by contrast, the ritual is performed approximately two months after the birth and there is no restriction on the size of leaves used. The mother first touches the forehead of the child with a leaf and tears it into two and then puts a leaf each around the wrists and the ankles of the child, snapping the leaf into two, each time saying, ‘lhou mia hi mia kwü shü to’ (‘may you reach or live to the fullest in every field’). In Khonoma village this ritual is performed after each new moon day for three years or until the mother becomes pregnant again – whichever is earlier. Next, the mother (or the father, if the mother is too weak) kills either a young hen (vügu) or a young cock (vüzü), according to the sex of the child. A new fireplace is made with three wooden pegs,12 on which the chicken is cooked in water fetched earlier in the day. The chicken is eaten by the mother all by herself before sunset, and any left over is thrown out. Thereafter the mother cleanses the utensils and her hands – an action called pruo, referring to the cleaning of utensils after a ritual meal.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice

89

After the four days, kenyü is over, and the infant is taken outside the house for the first time. A ritualistic visit called tchü-khrü (‘first day to the field’) is made to the nearest cultivation which should be kharu-sie (i.e. outside the khel gate). The mother is accompanied by a child of the same sex as the infant, from her husband’s family or from his clan. The child who accompanies the mother and her infant should be carefully chosen and should have good qualities, for the infant will grow up with similar attributes. For this visit the mother carries ‘just as a token’, as it was put to me – a small gourd filled with rice beer and a handful of rice to eat in the field. The infant is made to touch the agricultural implements, after which the mother works in the field ‘just as a token’. Thereafter all of them return to the village. In Kohima this ritual is performed only for a female child, while for a male child a cock is killed, cooked on a separate fireplace and eaten by the mother. The difference perhaps reflects the traditional division of labour in which women carried out most agricultural activities. On the same day, the mother and infant accompanied by the child make a visit called kemesa kikru (‘clean’, ki-kru ‘house-family’) to the house of a clansman to seek his blessings (thezha). In Khonoma village, the infant is carried either by a man or a woman from the father’s clan according to the sex of the infant. The family which is chosen for this purpose should be ‘clean’ (kemesa), which means that there should not have been any incidence of death, abortion or miscarriage in its recent past. The family so selected is apprised of the visit beforehand and when the mother arrives at their house, the couple offer her something to eat and bless the baby. This is the first time since childbirth that the mother eats food which has not been prepared by her (or her husband). The performance of kemesa kikru marks the end of the ritual confinement of the mother and the child, making them ‘clean again’ (mesa-te). If these rituals are not performed properly, misfortune may befall the child and family. At the end of the nuobozhü, all the cooking utensils that have been used by the mother are taken out through a hole in the back wall of the house and thrown outside the village, so symbolically ridding them of the contagion. In summary, Angami birth rituals lay out the spatial movement of the mother and child. They are in domestic seclusion, confined to a space which is otherwise a part of the larger family space. They are associated with the floor of the house – a plane which is below the normal level of social interaction, since the Angami normally use a wooden seat to sit on and a wooden bed for sleeping. During the liminal period of four days in this rite of passage, mother and child are considered highly polluting to the male members, especially the hunters. The prohibition on the movement of the mother and child is broken by the mother going outside the house and beyond the village boundary to fetch water and the zhohe leaves from the village spring. On the fifth day, the last day of ritual isolation, the mother takes the infant, accompanied by a child from the father’s clan, to the paddy field – an activity space with which women are associated. Thus the movement of the mother and infant follows an inside– outside and a centre–periphery pattern. The final visit to the house of a ‘clean’

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

90

A Matter of Belief

family from the father’s clan formally ends the seclusion, making the mother and child clean again and so ritually incorporated in the clan of the father.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Death and Burial While rites of pregnancy and birth are expressed through a notion of spatial usage that cautiously probes the future awaiting mother and child as they move from the security of the home to the outside world, Angami burials take account of the dead person’s life that is now ended and of how their death will in future affect the living who remain. The Angami word for ‘life’ is kerhei. As mentioned earlier, upon death (kesia) a person is spoken of as terhuo-rhei, implying a transition from life in this world to life in the other world. It also relates to the concept that the soul of an individual becomes a terhuo-mia after death. In Angami eschatology, life in the next world is said to be the same as in this world, a claim which may or may not be affected by or perhaps partly derived from Christian ideas, although many Angami regard it as indigenous. What is however clearly pre-Christian and indeed common in many societies of the world is the recognition among Angami of two kinds of death – normal (kesia) and bad (kesia-suo or sia-suo or kerucha). To die by drowning, by burning, in childbirth, in war, in accidents, or to be killed by wild animals, are all regarded as bad deaths. The place of burial and the period of mourning differ for these two types of deaths. And in the category kesia-suo, the procedure of burial may differ according to the cause of the death. In the past, even hearing the news of somebody’s death in their village, on the way back from the fields, required the people to discard their baskets, and whatever else they may have been carrying, outside the village or the clan gates. The Angami bury their dead; the burial rituals are said to vary from one village to another, and even within a village from one clan to another. To bury is akhru and the word for grave is mekhru. Those who die a normal death are buried inside the village. Most often the graves are made in front of the house or along the village path. Traditionally, cloths, shields and baskets along with other personal items which belonged to the dead were displayed on the graves (see figure 3.1). These are now rarely seen; most graves are now decorated with plastic flowers (see figure 3.2), an influence of the Angami Christian’s way of decorating the graves.13 The customary rules for burial and period of mourning (senyü) are more or less still followed by the Christians, but they do not perform the traditional rituals.14 These have been replaced by the Christian funerary rites. Traditionally, the first five days after the death are penyü for the whole clan of the deceased. During this period they abstain from agricultural work and do not interact with strangers. No food is cooked in the house until the burial is over; food for the family is brought over by close relatives. The family of the deceased is supposed to follow a thirty day penyü. If the whole family is unable to do so (which is often the case), then only one of the members may observe it. However, on

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice

91

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.1 A traditional Krüna grave, known as shietsa, displaying the personal belongings of the deceased on a bamboo frame. Such graves are now very rare. Viswema village, 1990.

Figure 3.2 Grave of a young Christian man decorated with imitation flower wreaths. Decorating graves with flowers is now common to both Christian and Krüna Angami. T-khel, Kohima village, 2006.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

92

A Matter of Belief

every fifth day of this thirty-day period the whole clan observes a penyü. During the thirty-day mourning period, at every meal, some food is kept aside for the dead. This is buried on every fifth day of penyü in the last room of the house called the kinoutshekou (or ki-nu-se-kou ‘the secret room’), inside which clothes, ornaments and rice beer containers are kept, and kizie is performed on festivals. In Kigwema the Christians observe only one day’s penyü, although the mourning period may last from five to ten days. Before the burial, the dead body of a man is washed by either his father or youngest son; that of a woman is washed by either her mother or youngest daughter.15 According to Angami customary law, the youngest son inherits the father’s house, ornaments and clothes, and the youngest daughter inherits the mother’s ornaments and clothes. If an unmarried person dies, his or her belongings are washed and thus, symbolically, made new before being used by their siblings. As soon as the news of a death is received, the clanspeople gather near the house; the men sit outside and talk among themselves, while the women sit inside the house and wail. The mourners are constantly supplied with either tea or rice beer by the close relatives of the deceased. The ritual wailing by women would begin even when the death had occurred elsewhere and the body was yet to be brought into the house. I came across such an incident in Kigwema village. I heard the sound of wailing of women coming from a khel adjacent to where I was conducting my interview. When I asked my host why the women were wailing, he told me that they had received news of the death of a boy, who had gone to Dimapur for some work. The cause of the death was not known then, but some people from the khel had left for the town to bring the body back. My host (Christian) advised me to keep away as he felt uncomfortable going there because the family was from a different clan than his, and also because of the Angami custom which requires the family to be under ritual isolation for five days after a death. After the body has been washed, care is taken to cut out any rat-eaten portion from the clothes of the deceased so as symbolically to make both the body and the clothes clean (chü kemesa).16 The dead body is placed on a wooden bed in the first room of the house. Thereafter, the official burier, shierulieva,17 places a sharpened needle of bamboo (seithei) in both hands of the deceased. Next, he takes a metre-long bamboo stick, burns one end of it in the hearth fire, carries it outside the house and then marks a circle around the place which has been dug up for the grave, with the burnt end of the stick. This is said to remove evil spirits (terhuo-ke-suo) from the site of the burial. Before placing the body in the grave, the father or the eldest son of the deceased traditionally gives a loud cry (mekwü) and waves a spear or a dao in the air, or fires a gun to chase away the evil spirits (a Christian interpreter translated terhuo-ke-suo as ‘the devil’). In a traditional burial, first a plank is lodged in the grave and on this the body is laid on its back. More wooden planks are then placed to cover the body

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice

93

from all sides. On top of the plank placed as the cover, stone slabs are put and then the grave is filled with earth. In the past the body was buried at an angle with the head higher than the feet, but nowadays the plank on which the body is kept is placed horizontally.18 These days most Krüna use a coffin like the Christian villagers, but a small number of people still use the old method. In the past if wooden planks were not available then planks from the front wall of the house could be used for the purpose of burial. After the funeral a feast is given to the clanspeople for which the funeral meat (theprie) is cooked over a new fireplace in utensils which are kept separate, especially for this purpose. The funeral meat is also distributed among the clanspeople. Some people may leave special instructions for the kind of funeral feast they would like the family to give after their death. If the family members fail to comply with the wishes of the dead person it is taken as a violation of a promise. The curse of the dead – kesia mero – falls upon the person to whom the desire was conveyed, making him dumb or mentally unstable (kemelo). The relatives offer body cloths to the dead. In a traditional burial, some of these cloths are buried with the body along with a number of other items which are gender specific. A man is buried with his dao, sickle, spade, beads from the necklace and seeds of gadzüsi. The clothes, especially the ones showing his status as the feast giver, his warrior’s shield and other items of personal use were (and are) displayed on top of the grave on a bamboo frame (see figure 3.1). Such a grave is called shietsa. If the person is a warrior or a hunter (rühou-mia) then on his grave sharpened bamboo needles (seithei) are erected. One of my friends remembered the grave of her grandfather (who had died in the 1980s) in Zhadima: it had been decorated with basketry figures of tigers and a wooden effigy to mark it as the grave of a hunter. In case of women, the following are buried with the body: a gourd container, a shallow basket filled with some paddy, millet, keshi grass and gadzosei seeds, beads from the necklace and a sickle. Ideally on the grave are displayed a paddy basket, a snail-catching basket, personal items such as an umbrella and shawl, and a wooden diamond-shaped frame on which threads of the same colour as the ceremonial white shawl are stretched to form a diamond pattern known as the lotseihou, which marks the grave as that belonging to a woman.19 But this is not followed assiduously. I did not see any of these items or even the lotseihou on my Krüna informant’s wife’s grave, who had died just a week before I interviewed him. These days it is seldom that such graves are seen. At first temporary graves are made and these are tended only in the period between the post-harvest ritual of Terhenyi and before the beginning of Sekrenyi, which is a period of liminality – of transition from one year to the next. It is during this period that the graves are cleaned and stone tombs are made. The restriction applies to both the Christians and the Krüna. It is not uncommon to come across open graves with a stone lining, which have been made in order to be used later on. A circular platform with stone seats at its circumference is made on the grave of a person who had been able to perform

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

94

A Matter of Belief

all the feasts in the series of feasts of merit. Such old graves can still be seen in some villages, especially in Khonoma where the ceremonial dance at Thekrenyi (just before the transplantation of rice) takes place on one such grave named Hiekha khwe-hou. Hutton (1921a: 48) identified it as the grave of the first priest, or kemovo, but I was told that it is the grave of Hiekha, one of the two founders of the village who had completed all the feasts of merit in the series. Some tombs along the village paths have sitting stones placed on them and are used by people to rest on their way back from the jhum fields and from the jungles after gathering firewood.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bad Death or kesia-suo Angami recognize different kinds of bad death. The burial is always outside the village and the tradition is followed by the Christians as well. The mourning period is shortened; only one day’s penyü is observed by the relatives of the dead, which may or may not be accompanied by the ritual wailing. The worst kind of death is of a woman with the baby still inside her womb. Such a death is called metsü-sia, which literally means ‘lazy death’, indicating that the woman had died without suffering the pains of labour and not fulfilling her social role of a procreator. The bodies of the woman and the baby are taken out through a hole in the back wall of the house. They are rolled in a bamboo mat and buried far away from the village (rüna-cie, ‘village-away’) so that her bad luck stays away from the village. The family of the woman does not observe a penyü, and ritual wailing is kenyü on such deaths. In Kohima, when a woman dies in childbirth but the baby survives, it is treated like a normal death, but in Khonoma it is regarded as a kesia-suo. Death by fire is called mi-se (= sia). Before burying the person, the burnt portions of the clothes are cut out. The body is buried outside the village gate (kharu-sie) in a place near a swamp where the earth is wet – dzütse, ‘wet place’; or in guo-dzü, ‘a place where water keeps seeping up’. The bodies of those who die in war – terhü-se (= sia); literally, ‘war-die’– or those who get killed outside the village, in the forest or at a faraway place from where the body cannot be brought back to the village, are buried there. If the circumstances are such that the body cannot be buried, then a leaf is plucked and placed on the body and a blessing is said for the dead person. The same is done should one come across a dead body in the middle of the forest. The words of the blessing are: Hie-ko ke-vi-u chüuo (‘we good will do that’), Norei ke-vi-u chü-volie (‘you also good’), meaning ‘good luck to us as well as to you’. The Angami have continued with the custom of burying those who die an unnatural or violent death outside the precincts of the village because of the notion of bad luck associated with such deaths. The grave of a Christian woman from Kigwema village who had been murdered in Dimapur town was made at the outskirts of the village near the fields. In some cases those people who have married an outsider, a non-Naga, are not allowed to be buried inside

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice

95

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

the village, as happened in the case of a (politically) prominent person from Khonoma village several years ago. However, the decision to allow those who marry outside the community to be buried in the village rests with the village elders. The following description of a Christian burial will give an idea of the similarities and differences between traditional and Christian funerals. In October 1997, I observed a Catholic funeral in the Tsütsonoma-khel of Kohima village. The deceased, a 95-year-old man, had been the oldest man in the khel. He had died late at night and his clanspeople had taken turns to sit in the house. When I went to the village the next day, the sons and nephews of the deceased were digging the grave in front of the house. As the ground was uneven and the grave was being dug adjacent to the staircase leading to other houses at a lower level, the grave had to be dug very deep. The clan members had gathered: there were several people who had come to pay their last respects to the deceased. Some of the women sat inside the house, while others sat on chairs in front of the house and in the compound of a neighbour’s house. On the roof of an adjacent building, men sat on rows of chairs talking with each other. Inside the house, the body lay in a coffin in the first room on the right of the entrance. Only the face of the deceased was visible, the rest of the body being covered with an Angami black lohe cloth. Around the coffin a number of wreaths were arranged and flowers were placed in vases. On the wooden partition which separated the room from another one behind it, were hung several new lohe cloths that had been offered to the deceased by the relatives. There were four women sitting inside the room, reading out verses from the Angami Bible. After a short while they began to sing funeral hymns and to wail. Outside the room, in the corridor and in the kitchen to which it led, young girls, women and some men were sitting on the wooden benches. My friend (who was from the same clan) and I also went inside and sat there for some time. Meanwhile, tea and snacks were being served to everyone. The funeral was to take place at two in the afternoon. Flyers had been printed with the name of the deceased and the schedule, along with two verses in Angami which were to be sung by everybody after the funeral service conducted by the assistant parish priest. At two o’clock the assistant parish priest arrived, accompanied by some of the clansmen of the deceased who had gone to fetch him. Two wooden benches were brought out on which the coffin was laid, with a wreath on top of it. The lid of the coffin had a glass window through which the face of the deceased could be seen. One of the daughters-in-law of the deceased sat down on a stool next to the coffin; she kept caressing the window and wailing ‘father, why have you left us’ (see figure 3.3).20 Meanwhile, the assistant priest read the verses and one of the men waved incense near the coffin. This was followed by a speech in Angami by the deceased’s son praising him, at the end of which he began to cry. Then another person from the clan read a prayer in Angami. This was followed by the blessing of the dead by the priest in English which was simultaneously translated by a man into Angami. Meanwhile, the second daughter-in-law came out and sat down near the coffin. The priest then placed a square piece of white cloth on the coffin. Thereafter, everyone sang the verses which were printed in the flyer that had been distributed earlier. One could hear the keening of the daughters-in-law in between the singing.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

96

A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.3 Funeral of an elderly man being conducted by a Catholic priest in T-khel, Kohima village. In the photo the daughters-in-law of the man are seen sitting next to the coffin, which was later buried in the forecourt of the house, 1997. Finally the coffin was lifted by the sons and nephews and lowered into the grave. Before lowering it, the assistant priest read out some verses from the Bible. On top of the coffin stone slabs were placed and then it was filled up with earth. At this stage the crowd began dispersing, with only the immediate relatives staying back until the grave had been filled up. The tomb, decorated with wreaths and plastic flowers, was enclosed in a fence made of wire mesh which was covered with a roof and had a small gate.

Although there is variation in burial practices between villages and sometimes within different khel of a village, a basic pattern is followed. The traditional burial practices have been undergoing a change under the influence of Christianity, as is apparent with the increased usage of coffins for burying the body. On the other hand, the Christians have continued to follow some of the customs from the traditional burial: burying in front of the house or, if there is no space, along the path in the village. A victim of bad death is buried outside the village according to the traditional law. Some Christian graves are decorated in the traditional manner, displaying the personal belongings of the deceased, and traditional graves are decorated with plastic flowers. Although the traditional period of mourning has been reduced among the Christians, the custom of distributing funeral meat to the clansmen is still practised.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice

97

We may here summarize the life-cycle rituals accompanying birth and death among Angami as clearly spatialized, with insistence on proper sites inside or outside the village for a range of acts such as burial of the dead and a newborn’s umbilical cord, and the various periods of mourning and isolation undergone by relatives of the dead or by the mother of a new child. The village and the clan are the primary units to which people refer in burial and childbirth rites, within which the focus is on particular individuals such as mother and child or the deceased relative and their key mourners. The rites are more to do with warding off misfortune than curing or reversing trouble that has already occurred. In a sense these rites of passage are a way in which the village and clan recognize that birth and death are sometimes problematic through their effects, but that they are also a means by which problems can be avoided if carried out correctly. The rites point up a nice balance between the collective concerns of village and clan on the one hand and, on the other, of individuals such as mothers/parents or relatives of the dead.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Personal Rituals for Illness An individual’s concerns are not always nor necessarily part of more general considerations such as village or clan. Sick or suffering Angami can, or could traditionally, turn to a repertoire of personal rituals during illness episodes. Some are rarely carried out nowadays and remain only in the memory of older people, who remember them being performed in their childhood or even by themselves before their conversion to Christianity. Others are still used for cure or restoration by individual Krüna. A few personal rituals were mentioned by Hutton (1921a: 233–36) as well, although with certain variation in names and methods of performance. In the case of one of the rituals, called derochü, Hutton (ibid.: 234) described an elaborate performance, which my informants could not recall when I tried to cross-check with them. Others cited are better known and sometimes still practised. Overall, however, they have declined. People have turned more to traditional herbalists and diviners, so that, in this sense, there is continuity of healing methods. Another source of decline is that over the years alternative self-treatment has been made possible, first through the availability of basic biomedicines such as aspirin and later by the services of biomedical practitioners. There is here an interesting contrast between the capacity of biomedicine sometimes to provide for the needs of individuals qua individuals, and its irrelevance for preventive measures of the kind sought by community rites of passage, such as those of birth and death. That said, among Angami some personal rituals of illness persist, even if most are no longer significant. As an illustration of their partial continuity from the period when Hutton described them, let me list those that were and are still performed by Angami. The rituals may be performed by the patient himself or

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

98

A Matter of Belief

by one of his relatives, or in certain cases by either the priest or a person holding the office of ruotho-mia.21 There is a variation among villages, and the rituals which I give are an amalgam collected from different villages.22 Traditionally, the Krüna used a personal method of divination referred to as mepuo puo kecü uro kechü, meaning ‘guessing the cause of the illness with the help of the gourd container’. A gourd container was filled with water, into which charcoal pieces taken from the hearth were dropped, taking the names of the places where the patient might have encountered the spirit saying, ‘puo hau chanunu terhuo dzu liero rokhushi’ – ‘let the sound of the dropped charcoal tell us whether the place guessed by us is correct’. A dull sound was taken as a no, while a sharp sound confirmed the guess. Once the place had been ascertained, an offering (usieshü) comprising a fowl, a few pieces of iron and tassels from the patient’s shawl would be left for the spirit at that particular place. While leaving the offering the relatives of the patient would say, ‘puo phuyiekezie haha welie di puo bu vitatuo’ – ‘if the patient was assaulted by you (spirit) at this place, then take this offering which is more valuable than the life of the patient, and let him recover from the illness’. Thereafter, they return to the patient’s house and address him: ‘Mhape te korei chu kemesa wateho vimha tallecie’ – ‘now that we have done everything to satisfy the spirit, you will be cured’ (here kemesa stands for ‘cleansing of sickness’). In the event the kinsmen fail in determining the correct spot with this method, or the patient does not recover after the performance of the ritual, a diviner is consulted. Dierochü or terharogi is the sickness which is a result of being talked about excessively by fellow villagers (see chapter 2).23 In Khonoma village the diviner is consulted to find out the cause of the sickness. The elders who I was interviewing told me that they consult Dolhouvi, the diviner in their village, for several illnesses. If the cause of ill health is divined as terharogi, then the prescribed ritual is performed by the priest (zievo) or the eldest man (phichü-u) on behalf of the ill person. In the front room of the house (ki-lo), the priest kills a chicken by piercing its windpipe with a sharp bamboo needle. The intestines of the chicken along with a feather from one of its wings are flung on the path near the house, and the rest of the chicken is taken by the priest to be eaten all by himself on the same day. Next, the sick man is given some rice beer to drink, after which he stands up, puts his shawl over his right shoulder, and then holding the ends of the shawl in front he shakes it up and down. This action, known as kewhü, symbolizes shaking off or getting rid of the sickness and/or bad luck. As we will see below, the action is also performed at one of the rituals at Sekrenyi. In Kohima village, people who have been talked about or are supposed to be of cowardly nature – explained to me as those who do not have the courage to face other people – are called mia-rülielhou. To get rid of their cowardly nature, a ritual is performed by the ruotho-mia. A young cock is taken outside the clan gate where its head is cut with the dao and thrown on the side of the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice

99

village path saying, ‘with this, all talk about you has been cut and thrown’ (da pro da phrü wate, mia-me milia ko hagie pfü te or shü wate). The rest of the chicken is brought back and is eaten only by the ruotho-mia. Sometimes, if a person has not been keeping well for a while or if he thinks that the time has come to ask for blessings from his kin, he gives a small feast to his clanspeople and his mother’s brothers. The feast, called thehe, requires the slaughtering of pigs or mithun (bison) depending on the capacity of the individual. This type of feast is still given. During one of my field visits to Khonoma, I saw a couple of pigs being killed24 for a thehe given by Dolhuni, whose house is used as a ki-kra-mia by one of the age-sets in Merhema-khel. In Chumukedima village, kerhupfüruo zhü ritual was performed to get rid of constant pain in any part of the body, which is experienced after returning from the fields. The pain is thought to be inflicted by a kerhu terhuo-mia and the remedy requires the making of an offering to the spirit. The affected person marks an egg with burnt charcoal taken from the hearth: four longitudinal lines are drawn from one end to the other, converging at both ends; these are bisected by a horizontal line along the circumference of the egg. While doing this the person says, ‘let all bodily pain be transferred into the egg’. The marked egg is then placed on the side of the village path outside the khel gate. Hutton also mentioned this ritual (as kirupfezhe), but according to him it is done specifically for stomach-ache and is carried out on behalf of the sick by another person (1921a: 234). Socha is a ritual done for children who fall sick frequently. The ritual, which is a repetition of that performed at the time of birth, is carried out by either parent of the child. Firstly, water is fetched from the village spring and some zhohe leaves are plucked. Then the zhohe leaf ritual is repeated. Next the father prepares a separate fireplace, and a chicken is strangled and cooked in the water which was brought from the spring, over the new fireplace. The chicken is eaten before sunset only by the performer of the ritual, and any remaining portions are thrown away. This is followed by pruo, the ritual cleansing of the hands and utensils with water. As was mentioned earlier, uhu-kechü or toothache is traced to a breach of a taboo by a family member. If the family or the individual is interested in finding out the particular incident which caused the toothache he would consult a diviner. Otherwise, mezhu thurha nanyü (mezhu ‘to cut’, thurha ‘swallow’) is performed. Two boys from the same clan as the sick person, who should be ‘clean’ – which in this context means ‘virgin’ – carry out the ritual. Two leaves of thesie plant,25 which should not have any tear, are first washed with water and then the sick man touches the leaves with his hands. These leaves, kept one on top of the other, are held by the boys at either ends with their left hands, and with their right hands they tear the leaves along the length, from centre to outward, with a pair of sticks made of the thatch grass. While cutting they say, ‘let the pain go away as we cut this leaf’ (Mezu mezie pfu kekaro hathurha wadi puo bu vite tuo). This is an obsolete ritual and the usual

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

100 A Matter of Belief

now is either chewing a green tobacco leaf or keeping it pressed against the aching tooth.26 In Chumukedima village, I was told that among both the Christian and Krüna Chakro Angami, whenever a tooth falls out, even if it is a milk tooth, the person to whom the tooth belongs performs a little rite to ask for a healthy tooth. Taking the tooth in the hand, while lying down on the bed, the tooth is flung under the bed repeating the following after the eldest man of the family: ‘sokru no a hu kesuo hau pielie di n hu kevi-u atsü cie’ – ‘tell sokru (a slippery rock lizard) to take this bad tooth and give back a good tooth’. In addition to the above rituals there are certain remedies which were resorted to in the past. As a remedy for a persistent headache (utsü kechü, utsü ‘head’), a rough basketry bamboo cap was woven, and all around its circumference feathers of the domestic fowl were attached. This cap called tsüba (literally, ‘head-sit’), was placed on the sick person’s head for a couple of minutes and then removed saying, ‘ntsü kechüü yhu wateho’, meaning ‘your headache has been removed’. For a constant cough (rükhu), some ash from the hearth was wrapped in a piece of cloth, threaded and worn around the neck until the cough was cured. For malaria (shü-rüki), two pieces of the stem of the kuchünebi plant (Sida acuta) were washed, wrapped in a clean piece of cloth and then put around the neck of the patient by his mother, or by some other relative if the mother was not available.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Rituals for Stopping the Recurrence of Bad Dreams Recurrent bad dreams are regarded as an affliction requiring treatment. The personal rituals or nanyü for chasing away bad dreams are called mho-suo nanyü. If the victim is an old man he is required to offer an unblemished cock (thevü) to the terhuo-mia. In the case of children and women a themu-mia is consulted who, after divination, prescribes the offering for the terhuo-mia. In most cases some pieces of iron and a cock are left at the prescribed place with an appeal to the terhuo-mia to stop the bad dreams. It is generally held that performing mho-suo nanyü is sufficient to stop bad dreams and that it should be performed only once by a family. However, a recurrence of bad dreams even after the performance of mho-suo nanyü requires the performance of a series of nanyü. The first is pholonyü which literally means ‘to increase the content (of a ritual) or to expand it’; a cock is offered to terhuo-mia and the whole family observes strict penyü or cloistering; that is to say all the family members stay inside the house, do not step out of the compound and do not interact with outsiders. In Chumukedima village, this ritual is known as mhoshü gaka, meaning ‘sharing of the bad dream curry’ (shü is same as suo, but spelt differently in Chumukedima dialect; gaka ‘sharing curry’). The person who has been having recurrent bad dreams takes a chicken outside the clan gate in the evening. On his way he does not speak to anyone. Outside the gate he kills the chicken and wraps its intestines, liver, feathers and feet in a leaf, and leaves this

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice 101

offering (for the terhuo-mia) by the side of the village path. Then he returns to the house with the rest of the chicken, which he cooks and shares with the family. If the bad dreams still continue then one performs a damoge nanyü, which is a stricter version of pholonyü and means to ‘cut the body of the dream’. Should the bad dreams cease to trouble the person after the performance of damoge, he is obliged to give a feast called phichü pehie, to his clan members. The feast is named after the ‘clan elders’ (phichü-mia; pehie ‘to give a feast’) whose blessings are sought by the sufferer of mho-suo. A themu-mia is consulted if all the above nanyü fail to yield the desired results. The themu-mia generally prescribes throwing some pieces of iron in a particular direction. A recurrence of bad dreams even after consulting the themu-mia portends the death of the person. It is believed that people who die in such a manner appear in their children’s dreams to demand the installation of a memorial stone or building a masonry grave (which may be used as a sitting place) in their name. Such memorial stones are installed with the help of kinsmen, who are in return offered rice beer and meat. On the memorial stone or grave a fowl is released after tying a black thread around one of its legs to indicate that it was offered as a sacrifice. Such a fowl, although it can be eaten by anyone who finds it, should not be offered again as a sacrifice.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Concept of Sacrifice The act of offering certain items to the terhuo-mia in exchange for the patient’s soul is termed usieshü (in Kohima), uroshü (in Kigwema) or terhuo shü (in Chumukedima). The verb shü means ‘to perform’. In the Angami dictionary the term is listed as ruosuo (Sekhose 1984: 208) and explained as ‘mha pie terhuomia ketsü’, which is translated in English as ‘sacrifice, offering to God’ (ketsü in this context stands for ‘exchange’). Elsewhere (ibid.: 188), Sekhose translates the term phousuo as ‘ransom/atonement’. Usieshü may be equated to the concept of sacrifice understood as a form of exchange (see Hubert and Mauss [1903] 1981).27 In the context of the illness rituals, usieshü seems to convey some of the ideas listed by Evans-Pritchard when he talks about the numerous and complex notions involved in the Nuer sacrifices – among them bargain, exchange, ransom, substitution and gift (Evans-Pritchard [1956] 1962: 282). Beattie (1980: 43) also develops the point that a sacrifice could take different forms – it could have the objective of being a scapegoat, in which the supernatural power is asked to exchange the offerings for the release of the captured soul of the sick. Usieshü is carried out when the illness is thought to have resulted from the abduction of the soul of the sick by a bad terhuo-mia. It forms a part of the ritual of ‘calling back the soul’ known as ruopfü kekie (kekie ‘to bring back’). I was told by Ngulhou, the diviner from Kohima village, that the contents of the usieshü differ according to the severity of the illness. For someone suffering

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

102 A Matter of Belief

from fever (rüki), small pieces of iron, which have been cut from an old implement or scrap metal with a dao, are first washed with water, placed on a plantain leaf and then left at a place outside the village gate, as prescribed by the diviner. If a person is seriously ill and ‘almost on the death-bed’, then a ‘clean’ fowl is used for the offering. First its beak and legs are washed because, as one of my informants explained, the fowl ‘eats all sorts of dirty (kerhu) things and walks about in dirty places’. Thereafter, it is placed on a plantain leaf and left at the prescribed place in the forest. In Chumukedima, before leaving the fowl, the performers (usually male relatives of the sick) call out the name of the sick person several times until a response in the form of a sound of the bird, animal or human voice is heard. In Kohima, the performers of the ritual first address the terhuo-mia, ‘we are giving you something better than what you have’, and then address the soul of the patient saying, ‘come forward and let us go back’. After leaving the usieshü, the performers are not supposed to look back as doing so would cancel the whole ritual. It is believed that after this ritual, if the soul of the patient returns, he will immediately feel better. The usieshü generally comprises eggs, fowls, iron pieces and tassels from the body cloth of the patient. These offerings are typically left behind the village gate or at the side of the village path; or at a spot outside the village, as prescribed by the diviner – always outside the village boundary in the uninhabited space and in the evening, by when, it is presumed, all the villagers will have returned to the village.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Rituals for Epidemics Placing sacrificial offerings outside the village boundary is an implicit indication of sources of power that come from outside the normal, lived world and of vulnerability to such forces once beyond the nominal and symbolic safety of the village. It is recognized however by Angami that epidemics, while clearly emanating from the outside, cannot easily be kept at bay but are liable to enter the home and inflict its members. Special rituals are needed to lessen their impact. Thesa refers to something which spreads. In Kohima, the term thepe-thero is used when an epidemic affects the human population, and thepe-thesa is used when it affects cattle or domestic animals. In Chumukedima, thepe-thero is translated as ‘epidemic bad luck/bad spirit’, referring to the belief that epidemics descend upon a village as a punishment – a sort of ‘teaching of a lesson’ – by the spirits when people fail to comply with traditional norms (see chapter 2). In the past the Angami and other Naga feared epidemics of influenza, smallpox and cholera, for which they had particular names. In the event of a smallpox epidemic, the Angami resorted to extreme measures to appease the spirits who were thought to ‘sow the disease’, by offering a human head or part of it. A.W. Davis, who was deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills in the 1890s, while mentioning a smallpox epidemic in Kigwema village, wrote that: ‘out of

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice 103

the four khels of the village, the people of the upper two khels, who had been vaccinated but had little faith in new therapeutics, went on to bring a human head to appease the angered spirits and consequently remained free of the disease which decimated the two lower khels’ (see Gait 1898, cited in Hutton 1921a: 160). Similar beliefs prevailed among the other Naga groups.28 Mary Clark mentioned in her memoir that when a smallpox epidemic broke out in an Ao village after an English survey party had stopped there, the villagers blamed them for bringing the disease and decided that ‘a European head should pay the penalty’ (Clark 1907: 96), though it is not recorded as to whether one was secured for this purpose. Severe epidemics could prompt people to flee from the village and settle down elsewhere. It is said that Mima villagers had to leave their original village site after suffering one such outbreak following the legendary performance of a mock ritual. After several villages refused to accommodate them, they were finally granted land by Kigwema. Hence, to this day, they follow all the rituals of Kigwema and duly give the priest of Kigwema a share of all the ritual meat. Traditionally, the arrival of an epidemic required a village to practise cloistering: if a village was experiencing an epidemic it would put up fresh kurhi leaves as warning signals; in extreme cases a village would be abandoned. If a neighbouring village was experiencing an epidemic then as a therapeutic measure kurhi leaves would be hung on the gate as well as strewn on the path leading to the village, accompanied by an appeal to the terhuo-mia not to visit the village. Hutton observed that the Angami offered substitutes to avert epidemic diseases. During a severe influenza epidemic in 1918, he found the ‘paths round Angami villages were littered with odds and ends of clothing and ornaments offered in this way, and with eggs laid in the path for the same purpose, while very many chickens were turned loose in the jungle’ (1921a: 179). In Khonoma when a thepe occurs, the priest, in consultation with the elders, announces a day of penyü called thepe-kela, which means ‘doing a penyü for thepe’. During this the village observes cloistering and is rüsorüchümo, ‘closed to the outsiders’. Fresh leaves are put on the village gate and on the village path to prohibit people from both entering and leaving the village. Some years ago (1980s) Khonoma village observed a thepe-kela when several cattle in the village died in an epidemic. In Kigwema, I was told that during an epidemic the priest would kill a cat, divide it into two and then wind a thread around it and hang it in the middle of the village. On the day of the ritual the village would observe a penyü. Epidemic, cyclical and personal rituals among Angami have the immediate protection of members of the village or clan principally in mind, and tend to reinforce the relatively autonomous nature of these units. Angami communal rituals, including the most important one of Sekrenyi, also re-emphasize village boundaries but, through common themes, can reach out more widely and foster among villages and clans a common consciousness of themselves as

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

104 A Matter of Belief

Angami. Their precise occurrence is not however standardized, although there is something of a sequential order, and there are different versions of a communal ritual which can nevertheless be thought of as making up an Angami-wide practice. They are collectively organized and yet comprise aspects of the many smaller individual and cyclical rites, and so are constituted by these many elements of Angami religion and sickness practice.

Communal Rituals Communal rituals, especially those performed calendrically, are performed on certain days of the lunar cycle in accordance with the different stages of the agricultural cycle. As Bourdieu points out, ‘owing to the extremely important social function which it fulfils in orchestrating the group’s activity, the calendar is indeed of the most codified aspects of social existence’ (1977: 97).

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Calendar and the Calendrical Rituals The Angami follow the lunar calendar known as the khrü-phrü, literally, ‘moonreading’ (khrü ‘moon’, phrü ‘to read’) and an intercalary month, Kenou (or Kenyo) is added every four years to adjust the difference between the lunar calendar and the agricultural activities based on the solar cycle. The village priest announces the first day of the lunar month, and the day is observed as a penyü by his clan. The date for calendrical rituals at the various stages of the agricultural cycle29 is decided by the elders of the village according to the lunar cycle. The Ura Academy at Kohima has attempted to standardize the traditional calendar by issuing a guideline that in the leap year the intercalary month should be added after the month of Kezei. According to this guideline, the month of Kezei, with which the Angami year begins, roughly corresponds with the month of February of the Gregorian calendar (which is known as leshükhrü-phrü, ‘written calendar’, leshü ‘to write’).30 However, as we will see below, these guidelines are not and cannot be adhered to by the Angami groups, except perhaps by those belonging to the Northern and Chakro groups whose calendar matches with the one prepared by the Ura Academy. The months in the khrü-phrü are related to the stages of the agricultural cycle. In addition to the lunar cycle, time for a particular agricultural activity and with it the time for celebrating certain festivals is determined by observing the shift in the location of sunrise, or more precisely by taking into account the hill or mountain behind which the sun rises. This is combined with the observation of certain trees that flower in that season (Shürhozelie 1981: 1). Each village follows its own calendar. Therefore, at a given time a village is, simultaneously, ahead of some of its neighbours and behind others. For example, the month of Kezei, in which the Angami festival of Sekrenyi is

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice 105

celebrated, falls in different months of the Gregorian calendar for different Angami groups and, among a single group, on different dates. Thus in the Southern Angami villages, Kezie may fall anytime between November and January, while for the other groups it may fall in the months of February or March. Therefore, the Angami villages do not celebrate the calendrical festivals or thenyi at the same time. The agricultural cycle of the Angami villages in the east, that is the ones that come under the Southern Angami group, is ahead of that of the Western, Northern and Chakro villages. Subsequently, the festival dates in these villages fall earlier than the rest; furthermore, those villages which are dominant among a group of villages would celebrate the festival ahead of the subordinate villages. For example, Kigwema village celebrates its festivals ahead of the villages of Mima and Phesama. Festivals are celebrated first in the Chakhesang Naga village of Khezakenoma, which, as was said earlier, is the first village founded by the Angami ancestors. The priest of this village is the first to announce the date, and only after this can the Southern Angami villages announce their dates. The festival of Sekrenyi is celebrated in the month of December in Khezakenoma and in some of the Southern Angami villages, but sometime between January and the middle of March in other villages. Because of the difference in the calendar, it is sometimes quite difficult to get the exact date of the festival in advance. Although my informants could give me a rough idea of the dates of the festivals, I had been warned to confirm these closer to the event. My informants maintained that they could not tell me the date until a week before the event. This was not always the case, and sometimes certain dates were fixed a month in advance. But as I was to find out later in my fieldwork, in December 1995, at times even these dates could be changed at the very last moment. During the celebration of Sekrenyi, the traditional dress is worn on a certain day and a procession is taken out. In Kigwema village the date had been fixed for 16 December, and flyers had been printed announcing the commencement of the festival and the date of the procession. These were pasted all over the village at strategic points such as the bus stop, the youth houses and the cigarette shops. I had not been given permission by the Krüna villagers to see their first-day rituals because of the traditional prohibition on contact with women. But I had been told that I could watch the ceremonial procession and performance of the rituals at the original village site, which is in the middle of the Assam Rifle camp situated on a hillock above the present village.31 When I reached the village early in the morning on 16 December, I was told by my friend and interpreter from the village that in a meeting, held two nights before, the elders had decided that there had been a ‘miscalculation’ by them in counting the days of the lunar cycle, and therefore the date of procession had been changed to the previous night – I had missed the event. There was no way he could have contacted me because the village had no telephone connection.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

106 A Matter of Belief

This incident made me recognize that there could be flexibility in fixing the dates for calendrical rituals because of the possibility of ‘miscalculation’ and its rectification.32 Because of this my informants were never sure of giving me the right dates for a festival. As the main communal ritual of the Angami, Sekrenyi features in the lists of annual festivals of various Naga communities in the festival calendar of the Nagaland state. It has come to be regarded as an annual festival by the Angami and is celebrated by both the Krüna and Christian Angami. I have witnessed some of the rituals being performed in Kidima village, and the Sekrenyi procession in Kidima, Viswema and Kohima villages. In the following text I describe the festival from the information collected from informants, both the Krüna and those who had performed these rituals before they converted to Christianity. Despite some village variation, a basic pattern is followed. Further, some of the rituals are performed collectively by a number of villages, while the same are performed individually in others. Sekrenyi basically relates to the theme of renewal, to the cleansing of the body and of the village as a whole. Let me describe it in some detail.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sekrenyi Sekrenyi, the name of the festival, was explained by my English-speaking informants as ‘sanctification festival’ which is celebrated ‘to make holy’ or ‘to cleanse the body and the soul’ (uphou) of the male members of the society; the term itself is analysed as sekre, meaning ‘sanctification’ and thenyi, meaning ‘festival’.33 As the Angami were warriors and cultivators, the well-being of the body was a central concern with them. The Sekrenyi festival, as we shall see below, encompasses several notions. Sekrenyi begins on the twenty-fifth day of the month of Kezei in the Angami calendar. However, this does not mean that it is celebrated on one date of the Gregorian calendar by all villages. As mentioned earlier, dates of the ritual calendar, which is based on the agricultural cycle, differ between villages. Thus Sekrenyi is celebrated between the months of December and March by different villages. The duration of the festival varies and it could last for ten to fifteen days (see table 3.1). During this period it is penyü to go to the fields; however, the duration is reduced to five days for the Christian villagers, who participate in the festivities but do not perform any of the rituals associated with it. The fourth day of the festival heralds the Angami New Year. On the completion of Sekrenyi, when the men of the community have ritually cleansed themselves and sought blessings, the year is said to be open for activities such as cultivation, house building, and marriages. Traditionally, this is the time when old and dilapidated clan gates were (and are) replaced.34 It is the time when young boys who attain puberty are inducted into the traditional age-set system (see chapter 1), in which the youngest ageset is composed of those aged thirteen to fourteen. Sekrenyi is the time when

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice 107

the dead are remembered by an offering of rice beer at their graves; and, is also the time when, in some villages, the last set of birth rituals is performed for the children born in the previous year. And finally, the spatial movement of the participants during the performance of various rituals is symbolic of the maintenance of the political boundary of the village. We shall see below in the description of the ritual of Sekrenyi, how the spatial movements of the participants make the connection between centre and periphery – between the spaces inside the village and those outside the village, and how the khel as well as the village boundaries are symbolically redrawn. On the first day of Sekrenyi, the men slaughter animals such as the pigs, buffaloes, dogs and sometimes (but not necessarily) mithun. Dogs are slaughtered because the Angami35 consider dog meat to have therapeutic quality – it is thought to replenish vigour and vitality. This day is known as chüzanhie in Kigwema, literally ‘meat distribution day’ (chü ‘meat’, za ‘to distribute’, nhie ‘day’), and it is called themuo ke-zha in Kidima, which means ‘meat big’ (themuo ‘meat’, ke-zha ‘big’) because of the large quantity of meat that is cut. The slaughtering of animals begins early, about six in the morning. The meat is cut with a dao on an old bamboo mat and then portions are placed in separate heaps on plantain leaves. This meat is purchased by the clanspeople who would choose beforehand which part of the meat and what quantity they want; the price is fixed according to the current rate for meat in the village. In Kigwema, men are forbidden or kenyü to eat or drink anything in the morning until a small quantity of the liver of the pig killed for the festival has been roasted and thrown out of the main entrance of the house, with a prayer to the terhuo-mia for an increase in the number of their livestock. While the men cut the meat, the women clean up the house and compound, and perform kizie.36 Kizie refers to the consecration of the house with an appeal to the terhuo-mia or Ukepenuopfü to protect the house from the dangers of rain, wind and fire. For kizie, kemesa or ‘clean’ plantain leaves (i.e. which have no tear) are plucked with the right hand and then folded to form triangular receptacles into which some rice beer, specially prepared for Sekrenyi (and known as sekre-zutho), is poured. These are fixed to the main post of the house, called ki-ta-cie, and onto the front wall, which have either a small shelf or a string fixed to the plank for this purpose. In Kohima, kizie offering is also placed in the last room of the house, the ke-nu-se-kuo. In Kohima village, I was told that if a member of the family is not present at the time of kizie, or even if the cows37 belonging to the family are not there, the offering is placed at the base of the pillar instead of being fixed onto it. The kizie offering is also placed on those graves that are still in good condition. In Khonoma village, all the Krüna graves have a small stone fixed on one end of the grave, against which the plantain leaf cup is placed. Rice beer is poured into these leaf cups for the first four days of Sekrenyi. These are left on the graves and the pillars and walls to fall off naturally, or are removed only at the next big thenyi. Although I did not come across this information in my

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

108 A Matter of Belief

fieldwork, Shürhozelie (1981: 2–3) mentions that the rice beer used for kizie is made by symbolically imitating the traditional process. Some rice is soaked overnight, and the next morning it is pounded ‘just as a token’ on the pounding table. Then it is placed in a pot with some khrei (yeast) over which boiling water is poured. This preparation is poured into the plantain leaf cup before fixing it to the main post of the house. The second day, which is called pfeyie in Chumukedima village, the men collect wild plantain leaves (tepfe kelie), which should not have any marks or tears, and make mugs out of green bamboo, which should be intact, and not broken from the top. Either new wooden plates and spoons are made (or purchased) for the main Sekrenyi ritual, or the ones that are kept separately, only for the purpose of Sekrenyi, are cleaned. The cleansing of the utensils is referred to as tehie mekhu chü kesa (‘cup plate made new’). Three wooden pegs (tiese-sei) are made from the wood of the tiese tree for the new fireplace (miphou-se) for the next day’s ritual. In Kidima these are made from oak. The men clean the main source of water for the village – the village pond or spring – which is outside the village, and the path leading to the village, removing weeds and grass.38 This is said to cleanse the area of any evil influences and of bad spirits that might have been lurking around. Women are prohibited or kenyü from fetching water from the pond,39 and even from going near it until all the rituals on the third day of Sekrenyi are over. The men are supposed to abstain from sexual intercourse for the first three days of Sekrenyi, until the third day’s rituals are over. On the third day of Sekrenyi, known as uphousanhie in Kigwema, uphoumesa in Khonoma, dzü seva in Chumukedima, and uphouchü-kemesa or sekre in Kohima.– meaning ‘sanctification or cleaning of the thephou (the body and soul)’ – a series of rituals are performed by the men and by those young boys who are to join the first set of the age-set system. They set out for the pond before sunrise, about 2.30–3.00 A.M., wearing new shawls (either the black lohe or the white lohra-mhoshü, or in some villages both) and carrying their weapons – dao, spears and muzzle-loading rifles. On arrival, they wash their bodies and weapons, and appeal to the terhuo-mia/Ukepenuopfü for increase in the number of children, cleaning their thephou of illness and disease, bad luck and any wrongdoing.40 They ask for a grant of good health so that they may perform these rituals once again at next year’s Sekrenyi. In Khonoma the washing is done symbolically: first water is sprinkled on the forehead, and then sequentially, on the left side of the chest, the right arm, the left arm, the right knee and finally the left knee. Thereafter the men, one after another, in decreasing order of age, hold the shawl with both hands and shake it up and down saying, ‘kesuo kenyü ko pete kesuo wate, kechü kenyü aua kenyu’ (‘suffering and diseases are all shaken off; let no diseases and sufferings come upon me’). In Kohima village, the men perform this rite at the respective clan gates, shouting, ‘sekre senyü’. This action (kewhü) symbolizes the shaking off of bad

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice 109

luck and illness. Thereafter, the men carry some water back to the village which is used by them for the next set of rituals. After the men come back to the village, they either gather at the house of the phichü-u as in Chumukedima and Khonoma, or go to their own houses as in Kohima, Kidima, Viswema and Kigwema, to perform the ritual of udze-keneikhri (also known as yizei or vüzei), literally ‘bare hand strangling’ of a fowl.41 It is carried out in the front room (ki-lo) of the house, before sunrise. The adult married men kill a cock while the unmarried men and young boys kill a chicken that has not yet crowed. In Chumukedima village the phichü-u strangles the fowl first, followed by other men in decreasing order of age. The longer it takes for the fowl to die and the more it struggles, the better it is for the health of the person. The omens are taken by reading certain parts of the body of the dying fowl: first, the position of the legs is observed – the crossing of the right leg of the fowl over the left (peza-ba) foretells good health for the man, while the crossing of left leg over the right (pevi-ba) is taken as a sign of sickness and bad luck for the man. I was told that this omen is considered so important that a man would kill another chicken to get the good omen for his health.42 In Chumukedima, omen is also read from the wings of the chicken at the time of its death – if they stretch, it portends a good harvest; if the wings droop and twist, it is taken as a sign that the wind might destroy the crop. The intestine of the chicken is pulled out through its anus and the last portion of the intestine (puomie) is observed for omen: if it is full of food remains then it portends a fruitful year ahead, but if it is flat it foretells an ‘empty’ year for the household. If the anus and the appendix are of equal length then its a sign of prosperity and good luck, if not, then it foretells a bad year ahead during which the man may fall ill; if specks of blood are visible on the intestine these are taken as a sign of impending bodily harm or an accident. In Rüsoma village it is the diviner who reads the intestines for omens. The intestine is then hung on the main pillar (ki-ta-cie) of the house, first by the phichü-u, followed by other men in decreasing order of age. In Kohima village, the intestine tied to a feather plucked from the wings of the fowl is hung on the left-hand side on the front plank near the entrance to the house. In Kidima, Viswema and Kigwema villages, it is hung inside the house on the main pillar. Thereafter, the men light the fire by the traditional method using the fire stick (misei; mi ‘fire’, sei ‘wood’). In Chumukedima this is done by the phichü-u, the eldest man. In Kidima, after men come back from the pond they go to their own houses. First, the man hammers the wooden pegs into the floor of the first room (ki-lo) to make the fireplace. Next, he sits down on a wooden stool and strangles an unblemished cock and reads the omens from its legs and intestine. Thereafter, he lights the fire by using the fire stick. A small amount of dry moss is kept under the stick as tinder. Pressing the stick under one foot, the bamboo thong is pulled to and fro vigorously until the sparks light up the tinder and the thong snaps into two. An omen is read (misu-kizei) from the broken ends:

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

110 A Matter of Belief

if the left end is longer than the right it is said to predict good health in the coming year. In Khonoma village, lighting up of the ritual fire by using the firestick is called mi-ki. In Kohima, the fire is nowadays lit by using matchsticks. After the sunrise, in Chumukedima, the men fetch two plantain leaves, fold them to make a cup, and into this cup a piece of ginger and chicken liver is flicked by the index finger of the right hand. As was done earlier, this is performed first by the eldest man, who is followed by others in decreasing order of age. This offering is then placed at the base of the kita-cie. Thereafter, the phichü-u stirs the chicken in the pot with a wooden spoon and tastes it. The act, known as mha metha, literally ‘food to taste’, is repeated by other men, once again in decreasing order of age. In Kidima, once the fire has been lit, the chicken is cleaned, cut into small pieces and then cooked over the new fireplace. While the chicken is being cooked the man makes plantain leaf cups, into which he pours the rice beer and fixes it onto the pillar in the ki-lo. Next, he pours some rice beer into another leaf cup, which he tilts down to pour a few drops onto the floor for the terhuo-mia and then drinks from the cup. This rice beer is kept separately from the rest and is consumed only by those men from the house who perform the Sekrenyi rituals. Thereafter, the man takes some pieces of cooked chicken liver from the pot, places these on a plantain leaf and flicks these out of the front door with his fingers, uttering a curse on his enemies. Everybody, including the Christian villagers, takes care not to cross in front of the house where the ritual is being performed lest the curse may fall on them. The men eat the cooked chicken the same day before sunset. Any leftover chicken is thrown away. The Sekrenyi utensils are cleaned (theprou) and put away until the next Sekrenyi. During all these rituals the women are, ideally, supposed to stay away from the site of performance. It is only after all the rituals for the day have been performed that the men may interact with the women. In Kidima, I had observed that the wife of the man who was performing the rituals had come into the room with the rice beer container. Being a woman and an outsider, I was not allowed to watch the early morning rituals at the village water pond/spring, but in Kidima village I was permitted by the neighbour of my Christian host to watch the ritual of killing the chicken, making the fire and reading the omen, during which outsiders are not normally allowed. In Khonoma village, after this ritual the men and young boys go to the respective clan gates. Each of them takes a small quantity of cooked rice wrapped in a plantain leaf and they carry their weapons – dao, spears and guns. At the gate they repeat the act of kewhü, in reverse order of age. The younger men do it first followed by the older, asking for the ‘festival to return soon’. The fourth day is the Angami New Year. In Khonoma village the men perform thi-sie, for which a green bamboo with an intact top is installed at the main village gate.43 From the time of installation until the ritual is over, women are kenyü to either cross the gate or even go near it. Thi-sie is specifically

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice 111

performed to invoke the blessings of Terhuopfu, the male aspect of the creator being (see chapter 2). The village priest asks for the blessing on behalf of all the men and then gives a shrill cry (mekwü).44 He is the first to shoot an arrow at the bamboo pole, followed by other men in decreasing order of age, who shoot arrows and fire guns at it. If these hit the pole, it foretells good fortune in hunting and war. In Kigwema village, the fourth day is called nuosotho (nuo ‘children’). On this day children take rice beer to their paternal grandparents’ and uncles’ houses and seek their blessings (theza). In return they are given packets of meat. This is practised by the children of the Christian villagers as well. In Kidima, on this day, the last of the birth rituals for children born in the previous year is performed by the mother, who strangles a chicken in the name of the child, and cooks and eats it all by herself. In Kidima village men play a special game, which is known as letsa when played by married men, and leda when played by unmarried men. The game requires the men to slide or push a bamboo pole over the ground. The distance covered is marked and the person who pushes the bamboo furthest is the winner. In Chumukedima, the fourth day, chü whuo phra meaning ‘animal chasing out’, is the day for the ritual hunt. Parts of the jungle are burnt to chase out the wild animals which are killed and brought back to the village and a big feast is arranged. If during this burning of jungles, someone accidentally burns somebody else’s jhum crop, no fine is imposed on that person. However, burning of forest is strictly prohibited from the completion of the harvest until this day of Sekrenyi. On the fifth day, the thupfe-thie or ‘picnic for the cow herders’ ([mi]-thu ‘cow’, thu-pfe ‘cow-herder’, thie ‘eating together’), young unmarried boys and girls take their cows and packets of food into the jungle where they eat together. In Khonoma on this day, the unmarried men and women go to the jungle to collect wild vegetables and stems of the tirhu-the plant. The pith of this plant along with bamboo splints and chükrü fruits are used for making giant replicas of women’s necklaces, which are hung on the wall of the ki-kramia with wooden replicas of men’s ornaments (see figure 3.6). The decorations known as chutitho remain on the wall until the next Sekrenyi. The Sekrenyi procession, in which the Christians also participate, is taken out on either the fourth or the fifth day. Sometimes it is postponed by a day if the weather is bad. If a death has occurred just before Sekrenyi or during it, then the family of the deceased do not participate and the clan members may not dress up elaborately for the procession. For the procession, the young men dress up, wearing kilts, sashes and headgear specially made for the occasion (see figure 3.4).45 The clothes are taken from storage a couple of days in advance and are cleaned and sunned. Before the ritual procession sets out, the head of the Krüna – either the priest or the eldest man – stands at the thehu-ba, the stone sitting-circle near his

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

112 A Matter of Belief

Table 3.1 Rituals performed during Sekrenyi festival Day

Name

Ritual activity performed

First day

Chüzanhie or Themuo ke-zha

Slaughtering of animals and distribution of meat by men and performance of kizie or consecration of house by women.

Second day

Pfeyie (in Chumukedima)

Men collect wild plantain leaves. They either make or purchase new utensils for the rituals of third day. The main water source for the village is cleaned.

Third day

Uphousanhie, Uphoumesa, Dzü seva or Uphouchü-kemesa

Men and young boys go to the water source before sunrise to symbolically cleanse themselves. After this they return to the house to perform the ritual killing of cock and read omens.

Fourth day

1. Thi-sie or Nuosotho

1. A bamboo pole is erected and is used as target for arrow shooting. Children take rice beer to their paternal grandparents and seek their blessings. 2. In Chumukedima, on this day a ritual hunt is carried out.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

2. Chü whuo phra Fifth day

Thupfe-thie

Unmarried men and women take their cows and food-packets into the jungle where they eat together. In Khonoma, on this day unmarried men and women collect wild vegetables and plants from the jungle to make giant replicas of ornaments for their age-set house (ki-kra-mia).

Tenth day

Thenyi yatsei

Day of rest.

Eleventh day Bado

Day of rest.

Twelfth day

Mimema

Penyü or ‘no work day’ to observe the ritual against accidental fire.

Thirteenth day

Carhie

Village is closed to the outsiders; leaves and twigs are hung on the village gate to indicate cloistering.

Fourteenth day

Thenyi zha

A procession is taken out by men (also joined by women in some villages) in ceremonial dress. In some villages the procession is held earlier – on either the fourth or the fifth day of the festival.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice 113

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

house, and calls out to everyone to gather. I witnessed the procession in Kidima, Viswema and Kohima villages. In Kidima, men from different khel came up to the thehu-ba walking in a single file, carrying dao, spears and muzzle-loading guns. The older men carried spears, while the young men carried guns. Each procession was led by the oldest men from the khel. Once everyone was gathered, the priest/eldest man led the procession through each khel, stopping for five to ten minutes to walk clockwise in a circle, chanting rhythmically. From time to time the older men would give out a piercing war cry (mekwü), leaping into the middle of the circle with their spears and miming the stealthy body movements traditionally made before the taking of a head. At intervals the men kept firing their guns.46 After making the rounds of each khel, the procession proceeded towards the main entrance of the village and then turned back. Finally it stopped in front of the village council hall. The men and boys scattered and some formed small groups and continued to sing the Sekrenyi songs. Meanwhile the women brought rice beer in aluminium containers and served these in plantain leaf cups. In Viswema village the ceremonial procession was carried out separately in each khel. The one I observed was led by the priest of Rochüma-khel. The procession walked through the various lanes, finally terminating in front of the priest’s house. The men gathered in the courtyard in front of the house and the priest took an omen from the plantain leaf by tearing it and wrapping it around his fingers and unwrapping it. After this everyone drank rice beer in plantain leaf cups.

Figure 3.4 Sekrenyi procession. Young men from Kohima village dressed in traditional clothes are on their way to the local ground in Kohima town where members from other Angami villages are also gathering to participate in the annual celebration of the Sekrenyi festival, 2011.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

114 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Generally only men participate in the procession, but in Viswema village, in another khel’s procession, I saw some women as well. These processions are attended by Christians as well. And in Kohima village the procession was attended by women in full ceremonial dress carrying the ceremonial baskets on their backs (see figure 3.5).47 In Kigwema village, the procession is led by the phichü-u (the village elder) to the original village site which is now situated in the middle of the Assam Rifles camp in Jhakhama. Here the phichü-u offers rice beer with chicken and pig meat in plantain leaf cups at the ancestral stones.48 Thereafter, the procession is led to the ground where the men walk in a circle, chanting. During Sekrenyi and at the time of the procession several songs are sung in praise of the warriors from the khel. I was told by an old man in Viswema village that in the past, when sometimes khel of the same village could be at war with each other, singing praises of warriors who had taken heads from the other khel could lead to fresh violence and renewal of rivalry. After the completion of the first five days, the penyü on working in the fields is lifted for the Christians, but the Krüna follow it for fifteen days. During this period there is a lot of merry making – drinking, and eating of meat. People visit each other and gather at different age-set houses to drink and sing. In the evenings for the first five days, the young men and women sing sokre-sene, the Sekrenyi songs, either inside the age-set houses (pelie or ki-kramia) sitting around a fire, or else, as in Kidima village, while walking around the bonfire in the courtyard outside the pelie.

Figure 3.5 Young women from Kohima village in ceremonial clothes with the khophi baskets sitting in the spectator stand at the local ground in Kohima town during the communal celebration of Sekrenyi, 2011.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice 115

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.6 Men and women of Sievi ki-kra-mia of Merhema-khel in ceremonial clothes singing sokre-sene at the Sekrenyi celebration, Khonoma village, 2011.

In Khonoma village in February 2011, I attended a late evening session of sokre-sene at the Sievi ki-kra-mia of Merhema-khel, the age-set made up of 26–33-year-olds. The young men were helped by their mothers and sisters in putting on the large headgear (tsüla). All the men and women sat in a semicircle – on the left were men in ceremonial dress and on the right women in traditional Khonoma wrap skirt and body cloth (see figure 3.6). In the centre, a bonfire had been lit for which the chopped logs were brought in wickerwork baskets by young women participants. Songs were sung for nearly two hours during which tea was offered to the singers by the family who hosted the agegroup. Almost all the participants were Christian, therefore tea was offered instead of rice beer. In contrast, on the first day of kizie in Kohima village, I attended a similar gathering of pelie number 7. While the participants did not wear traditional ceremonial dress, they sang sokre-sene combining it with singing in English as well as songs from Hindu films (which was for my benefit as a guest). Although almost all the participants were Christian (some were Catholic), rice beer and lager beer in cans were offered with Sekrenyi dishes of cooked meat. The tenth day of the festival is called thenyi yatsei which means ‘festival pair day’; it was explained to me as the ‘even number day’. The eleventh day is for resting after the festivities, and is known as bado meaning ‘sitting (ba) or the rest

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

116 A Matter of Belief

day’. The twelfth day is the mimema, on which everybody observes a penyü for protection from fire. It is spoken of as ‘to make peace with the fire’ (mi ‘fire’) so that it does not destroy the village.49 On the thirteenth day, known as carhie, cloistering is observed; the village is closed to outsiders. Fresh leaves are hung on the village gate – a sign that no outsiders and no evil should enter the village; outsiders are barred entry lest they might bring evil influences with them. In Kigwema, the fourteenth day is said to be the festival day – thenyi zha, literally ‘festival big’. On this day traditional dress is worn, including the thekra, the headgear worn by young men. Sekrenyi, as was said in the beginning, focuses on the renewal of the health and vitality of the warriors (including former and future warriors). It is also the time when young boys are inducted into the first age-set. It must be noted that the Sekrenyi rituals of the third day have a marked similarity with those performed at the head-taking rite, although there is a reversal in the sequence. On the first day of bringing the head to the village, it is placed outside the village/khel gate. Young boys, who had been inducted in the first age-set during Sekrenyi, spear the head, and then return to their houses to take omens by killing a cock. On the second day all the men go to the village spring to symbolically wash themselves and their weapons.50 The first four days of the festival mark the liminal period of transition from one year to the next, which is also the period when men are prohibited to come into contact with women. In addition, the centre–periphery movement of men seems to symbolize drawing and redrawing of the political boundaries. On the first day of the festival, men move from their houses to the spring outside the village, and then to the village gate, and back to the house. On the final day of the festival, the procession begins from the central meeting place (thehu-ba), and after circumventing the boundary of the khel/village it culminates at the main meeting ground of the village or, as in Kigwema village, it ends at the old village site. Further, we find that the festival also emphasizes the relationship between the space of the village and that of the jungle, as represented in material used for the decoration of the age-set house, and going to the jungle to hunt the wild animals. To conclude, it is apparent from the above description of the various rituals related to health and illness, birth and death, and community renewal that there has been a continuing mutual adjustment of Christianity and animism. As concerns life-cycle rituals, Christians have continued with some while replacing the rest. On the other hand, with regard to burial procedures, the Krüna have adopted certain customs from the Christians. Very few rituals for personal illness are performed nowadays by the Krüna. Most have access to herbal remedies provided by traditional healers and also to the primary healthcare centre in their village. While these personal rituals may have declined, the various traditional healers – diviners, masseurs, herbalists and necromancers – remain important not just for the services they provide but for the links they constitute in a continuing accommodation of animism and Christianity, and of traditional and modern healing methods.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice 117

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The celebration of Sekrenyi by both the Krüna and Christians also speaks of a strong continuity of traditional practice and belief in the celebration of the festival for the health of the community and village. It combines the beginning of the New Year with the notion of renewal of the vigour and vitality of the community. The importance of the festival is also reflected in Sekrenyi being declared the annual festival of the Angami Naga in the state government’s list of festivals. Increasingly, annual festivals are also becoming a way of expressing community cohesion and cultural distinctiveness by a group of people from different villages, who may once have warred against each other but now see themselves as (mostly Christian) members of a single group. The important members of the community, who are mostly Christian and may or may not be part of the state government, have encouraged modern annual celebrations for each Naga community. A communal celebration of Sekrenyi by Angami on a set date can nowadays be read as a kind of manifesto of what it is to be Angami in the modern world. In consultation with the Angami Public Organisation, the state government has set aside 25 February as a restricted holiday in the state government’s calendar. Marking a fixed date has also enabled secular celebration of the festival by Angami who are living outside their villages in Kohima and Dimapur towns, in district headquarters, and also outside Nagaland in cities, such as Delhi, where there is a substantial presence of Angami students. At the same time, individual

Figure 3.7 Chakhesang dancers performing at the large Sekrenyi gathering in Tuophema, village of the present chief minister of Nagaland, at which the governor of Nagaland was the main guest, 2011.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

118 A Matter of Belief

village calendars are still followed. The large-scale communal festivals also reflect the current view that early missionaries and their form of Christianity denounced and destroyed Naga cultural heritage which now needs to be revived and celebrated through large-scale events worldwide (see figure 3.7). These large celebrations begin with a blessing by the pastor of the Baptist church and the singing of hymns by the local Baptist church choir, as I observed in Kohima and Tuophema villages in February 2011.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Angami Zapu Phizo, seen as the father of the Naga nationalist movement, translated nanyü as religion, while also putting on it the personal gloss, ‘anguish of mind’, reflecting the ongoing anguish felt by people at not being recognized as an independent nation by both the British and the Indian governments (16 May 1951 Plebiscite speech; see Nuh and Lasuh 2002: 128). 2. However, such birds may be eaten by old men, who are considered to have already passed their prime and thus be close to death. 3. Hutton spelt some of the words differently from the way they are now spelt by educated Angami. Although Hutton mentions the term kenyü (1921a: 190), he preferred to spell it kenna, which unfortunately means ‘sexual intercourse’ in Angami. 4. See Webster (1916), Katz (1928) and Macdonald (1975). 5. Similar observations have been made in other communities as well. For example, Hoskins (1987: 143) writes about the adaptation of prohibitions of the traditional system to the observation of the Sabbath day among the Sumbanese: ‘the seventh day was associated in the Christian system with a series of prohibitions of the tenth month of the Sumbanese calendar. It was not proper to sing or dance on Sundays, frivolous activities and feasting were frowned upon, and the violation of these taboos was accompanied by threats of supernatural sanctions.’ 6. Raum (1940: 77) noted that among the Chaga people, the wife was required to convey her pregnancy to her mother-in-law by announcing, ‘if God pleases, I am no more one person but two in my heart’ (cited in James 1997). 7. Twins are quite often treated in an ambivalent way – in some communities, for example the Uduk, they are considered anomalies and thus, ideally, to be destroyed (James 1997: 8), while in others they were given a different status from the rest of the children, as among the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard [1956] 1962: 128) and the Mandari (Buxton 1973: 244–45). 8. See also, Hutton (1921a: 214–16) for details of traditional childbirth rituals. 9. In the 1880s, Hattie Rivenburg, co-missionary and wife to Dr Rivenburg, narrated an incidence of such a birth witnessed by her in Kohima in a letter to her parents: ‘The other day we had quite a lot of excitement when a Naga woman gave birth to a child right in the road in front of our house. She was on the way up from her cultivation … We invited them to stay all night, but they felt they must get home, two miles away’ (Rivenburg 1941: 83). 10. However, Chinai (2004) writes that this view of Naga women being stronger has resulted in the neglect of maternal health and the non-availability of facilities to treat reproductive problems in villages, as well as in the district headquarters in Nagaland. 11. Prescription, as well as proscription, of certain foods during pregnancy and after childbirth is found in many cultures. In northern India, according to humoral beliefs, the mother is fed ‘heat’ producing food, especially sweets made of jaggery, edible gum, dried ginger and semolina. For comparable examples from Malaysia, West Africa, Greece, etc., see Laderman (1983), Farb and Armelagos (1980), and Davis-Floyd and Sargent (1997). 12. The traditional hearth for everyday use is made of stone and clay, but wooden pegs are used for temporary hearths made for ritualistic purposes. 13. See also Goody (1993: 277–82) for the use of flowers in cemeteries.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Religion of Practice 119

14. See also Hutton (1921a: 225–30) for details of traditional burial as was practised by the Khonoma villagers. 15. Details of the burial practice vary from one village to another and even from one khel to another. The information on burial rituals was mainly collected from the Lhisemia or L-khel of Kohima village. 16. Hutton wrote that in the case of ‘bad death’ the belongings of the dead are given away to old people (1921a: 229). 17. It seems the term shierulieva, derives from sia; I was told that shie and se are same as sia. The office of the shierulieva is open to a male from any clan. It is voluntary to take up the office of the burier and is done as an act of zevi, i.e. of helping other people. 18. At an excavation site in Jotsoma village, a team of Naga archaeologists found urn burials of an older type known among some of the eastern Naga communities who still produce large earthenware pots (see Jamir 2006). I would see this as giving support to the southern Naga claim that they migrated from the east. 19. See also, Kauffmann (1943) for a comparative note on such decorations on Angami and Lotha Naga graves. 20. I had taken the family’s permission to take photographs, but I hesitated photographing the body when it lay inside the house. However, during the ceremony, on seeing one of the men taking photographs, I felt less self-conscious and hence was able to take some photographs. 21. Ruotho-mia are people who are appointed by the first-sower and the first-reaper as assistants who, on their behalf, collect paddy from each household after the harvest. 22. Zazolie, herbalist and homeopath from Jotsoma village, gave me information on some of the rituals. 23. Hutton (1921a: 234) mentioned these two as separate rituals. The ritual for terharogi described by him is similar to that told to me. 24. Pigs and mithun are killed by piercing their hearts with a pointed iron rod or spear. 25. This plant, I was told, is also used in the thuophi form of divination (see chapter 4). 26. Tobacco plants are grown in between the stone crevices of the steps, which connect the houses on different levels, or in a small vegetable garden near the house. 27. See also Howell (1996), for examples of different forms of sacrifice among the South-East Asian societies. 28. One of my informants from Kigwema village told me that his paternal grandfather was one of the three men who had taken the head during this epidemic. See also Hutton (1928) on headhunting and Needham (1976) on the significance of the head and skull in Southeast Asia. 29. See Bloch (1977), Leach (1950), and Geertz (1973b) for the analyses of the concept of time and calendar in different societies. 30. See appendix 3 for Angami Calendar (khrü phrü). 31. Assam Rifles is the central paramilitary force for counter-insurgency operations and for guarding the Line of Control and borders in north-east India. It has a permanent campsite at Jakhama, about half a kilometre away from the present village of Kigwema. The ritual procession and dance takes place in the middle of the camp and is attended by the commanding officer and other personnel from the Assam Rifles. 32. See Drucker-Brown (1999–2000) on political aspects of calendars. 33. See also Hutton (1921a: 203–5) for the description of Western Angami Sekrenyi. 34. The most recent installation of a gate took place during the 1991 Sekrenyi at Kohima. Although the gate was made and installed by the Department of Art and Culture which is situated inside the old boundary of Kohima village, the traditional rituals were performed. In the following year, when the installation had been completed, the Sekrenyi procession of young men and women of Kohima village in full ceremonial dress passed through the gate. Since the 1990s there has been a wave of cultural revival, with a resurgence of ‘traditional’ rituals such as dragging of stones, installing megaliths and, among some northern Naga groups, of dragging and installing large hollowed-out wooden ‘log drums’. These are either sponsored by wealthy individuals or collectively by a clan (see Kunz 2008 and Oppitz 2008).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

120 A Matter of Belief

35. As well as the Sema (Sumi) and the Lotha (see also Hutton 1921a: 204). 36. The kizie is performed at all thenyi. Plantain leaves are used only for major thenyi such as Sekrenyi and Terhenyi, while the leaves of the tiese plant are used for lesser thenyi such as Meshü, on whichkizie is done on the first day of the harvest and continued until the last day. 37. My elderly informant elaborated that cows (mithu) are considered close to human beings because they also have a nine-month gestation period, and therefore they are a ‘part of us’. 38. During my fieldwork in Kohima in February 2011, which coincided with the Sekrenyi celebration, I found that the P-khel of Kohima village combined community road-clearing work with an income guarantee scheme, namely the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), implemented by the central Government of India. During the course of the community social work, the sub-divisional officer (SDO) in charge of the dispensation of the employment scheme came to inspect the work. His assistant noted the identification numbers that had been allotted to the unemployed persons. I was told by the SDO that each person would be given a hundred rupees for their work, according to the minimum wages regulation for road maintenance for Nagaland State. The mass social work in which both men and women participated culminated in communal eating. It should be noted that in fact the amount of money spent on communal eating exceeded the amount earned through the employment scheme. It was interesting to note that the traditional activity of path clearance that is part of the Sekrenyi celebrations was merged with a rural employment scheme. 39. In the past the women had to store enough water for these three days of kenyü, but nowadays in most villages there are water tanks in each khel, which saves the women from storing water. 40. One of my Christian interpreters translated the washing off of illness, bad luck and wrongdoing as washing off of ‘sins’. 41. One of my informants said that some rich people might sacrifice a chicken for each gun they possess. 42. Hutton (1921a: 204) also mentioned that in Jotsoma village if the omen was bad more than one fowl was killed until the favourable omen was got, and in Khonoma village this was done at intervals of one month. 43. The Chakhesang Naga, who are culturally close to the Angami, install two bamboo poles in front of the priest’s house during Sekrenyi. These are called anitsutekhru and apfutsutekhru and represent the well-being of women and men respectively. On these poles are hung several wild birds, which are killed by the young men. The greater the number of birds, the better the health in the coming year (see also Hutton 1921a: 205). 44. There are different types of mekwü for separate occasions, such as thi-sie, the feast of merit and during the Sekrenyi procession. According to an Angami myth these were taught to the Angami by the sky people. 45. This is the time of the year when sisters weave sashes, belts and body cloths for their brothers. Young women also gift belts and sashes to their lovers (Joshi 2007b and 2010). 46. The guns are fired by pointing the nozzle either up or down. While following the procession one has to be careful not to get in the way, with the guns being fired all around. During the first five days of Sekrenyi, gunfire is heard very frequently. During my fieldwork, a young boy in Kidima village was mistakenly shot in the leg on the third day of Sekrenyi and had to be taken to the Kohima town hospital for treatment. Recent (February 2010 and 2011) Sekrenyi celebrations featured many young man carrying (and shooting in the air at intervals) different kinds of weapons including automatic rifles such as U.S. carbines and AK-47s, which besides being a sign of prestige, to a certain extent denotes association with the Naga nationalist movement. The firing of numerous pistol and rifle shots during celebrations has come to be associated with the Angami Sekrenyi celebration. 47. Known as khophi, these are finely woven baskets made of cane used on special occasions, and are an essential gift to a daughter on her marriage. Such baskets are expensive, and can cost between 1,000 and 5,000 rupees. 48. Although I had missed the actual performance of the ritual, the next day I was able to go up to the site and see four plantain leaf cups lying at the base of the ancestral stones. The stones

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Religion of Practice 121

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

were inside the fenced compound of the commanding officer’s office, which was out of bounds and a restricted area where photography was not allowed. 49. In the past, the village houses had thatched roofs which were prone to catch fire from stray sparks from the hearth fire, especially during the windy months of February and March. After the Second World War Battle of Kohima, the Angami village houses that had been burnt down were reconstructed using corrugated iron sheets in place of thatch for the roof. Since then the durability of corrugated iron sheets has resulted in these being preferred to thatched roofs in Naga villages. 50. From the description of the head-taking rituals by Jashetha, ‘Naga pundit’ (1896) which was submitted to J.H. Hutton (see also Hutton 1921a: 239–40).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Chapter 4

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

TRADITIONAL HEALERS

The role of ‘shaman’ figures prominently in many studies of traditional healers. Given the diversity of characteristics covered by the term, it has something of the status of a religious odd-job word. Of Tungus origin, and with a literal meaning of ‘one who is excited, moved or raised’, it is most commonly used to describe healers who divine through inspiration and/or undertake a supernatural journey or an ecstatic trip to another world (Eliade 1974; Atkinson 1992; Lewis 1989; Hoppál and Sadovszky 1989; Peters 1981). Eliade (1974) distinguishes the shaman from other practitioners on this basis. However, the studies of inspirational healers from different cultures show that healers vary in their techniques and in the extent to which they are divinely inspired and, therefore, as Thomas and Humphrey (1994) have pointed out, the aspects of shamanism specified by Eliade apply only to certain communities of Central Asia. In the anthropological literature, the concept of shamanism has been developed on the basis of various criteria. There are three recurring approaches to defining shamanistic practices: a clear differentiation of roles, such as priest vis-à-vis shaman; the type of inspirational divination by which the shaman either is helped by supernatural beings (Spiro 1967: 230) or becomes a receptacle or medium through which they speak (Allen 1976: 511); and lastly, one in which a shaman is supposed to undertake a journey to another ‘supernatural’ world. With respect to these criteria the Angami divinational healer can be classified as shaman on the basis of his/her being helped by the spirits. But s/he is also much more than this and has considerable significance as an agent of accommodation between animism and Christianity, and in allowing diagnosis and cure to straddle the assumptions of traditional healing and biomedicine. My concern is to analyse how this brokering role has persisted. After all, the divinational healer seems marginal to the sociopolitical organization of the Angami village, yet has continued strongly in the face of the religious conversions of the majority of Angami to Christianity which, prima facie, opposes the beliefs on which animistic healing is based. Divinational healers using spirits are certainly key among Angami, reflecting the spirit pantheon as a fount of religious understanding and sickness aetiology. In Angami villages, however, one also comes across a large number of non-divinational healers such as bone setters, masseurs and herbalists. In addition there are necromancers and

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

124 A Matter of Belief

people who are skilled in extracting fish bones stuck in the throat. Taken as a whole, and based on the method by which the power to heal is acquired, Angami healers can then be divided into three types. First, those who are helped by the spirits; second, those who consider their talent as a gift from God; and third, those who acquire their power to cure after killing a particular wild animal (river otter). Although these differences of technique, support and specialization are mutually acknowledged, all such healers must interact with each other on the basis of their relationship to Christianity and whether they convert to it, and according to whatever biomedical knowledge and practices they are prepared to consider, adopt or reject. Such complexity is evident when we look at cases of individual healers, whose real names have been retained (see table 4.1), who are well known in their respective villages, and about whom information on them will not damage their reputations.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Angami Divinational Healers Divinational healers among the Angami are known as themu-mia. The root is themu, which means ‘to guess’, and the suffix mia, as already mentioned, means ‘people’ as well as ‘person’. Therefore a themu-mia is a person who can guess or predict; the term is used for both men and women diviners. In conversational Angami, sometimes the terms themu and themu-mia are used interchangeably. Several times in conversation, the term themu-mia was translated into English as ‘witch’ by my English-speaking informants. Sekhose’s dictionary also translates the term as ‘sorcerer’ but spells it as themou-mia and explains it in Angami as terhuo-keze-mia, which would literally translate as ‘one who associates with the spirits’ (terhuo ‘spirit’; keze ‘to associate’; and mia) (Sekhose 1984: 235). Elsewhere the root term themou is translated as ‘sorcery’ (ibid.: 234). Whereas monographs on other Naga communities devote some space to the divinational healer, there is not much ethnographic information available on the Angami divinational healer. Hutton’s ethnography was more concerned with the roles of the priest and the village headmen, who occupied the offices deemed important from the point of view of administration. Hutton mentions the themu-mia in passing: There are, however, forms of divination and witchcraft demanding more specialised knowledge, the people who practise them being private practitioners and not public functionaries. They are known as Themuma.1 (1921a: 242)

He then explained the role in a footnote on the same page: Themuma are persons who are recognised more or less on the strength of their own assertions as possessed by a god (Terhoma). They are not in any sense appointed by their fellow villagers. Their powers vary from merely dreaming dreams to the practice of genuine black magic. The Themuma is often able to divine only when in a trance or some such non-normal condition. (ibid.)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Healers 125

Even this brief description seemed to have been influenced by the description of similar diviners which he and Mills had come across among the Lotha, Rengma and Ao Naga. Hutton’s lack of interest in the role of themu-mia is clear enough and could be attributed to the marginal status of the Angami healers in formal village political and administrative organization. Unlike in some societies, where the role of shaman explicitly combines religious authority and may be politically powerful (see Lewis 1989; Taussig 1987; Lan 1985; Atkinson 1989), shamans among Angami do not ostensibly wield any such authority. We shall see later, however, that their informal influence is often considerable. It may be remembered that, on the basis of linguistic and slight cultural variations, the Angami are broadly divided into four groups (see chapter 1). The Angami priest is known as zhevo in the Northern and Chakro group, kemovo in the Western, and phichü-u in the Southern. In the first two groups the office of the priest is hereditary and runs in the line of the first founder of the village belonging to the Thevoma moiety, the elder of the two Angami moieties. Although the role of the priest, as ritual officiant, and shaman could combine in one person, the probability of this happening is very low. The only case I have come across was of Zelouvi from Kigwema village, who besides being a themu-mia, also occupied the office of phichü-u (the eldest man) who announced the ritual or the nanyü days and conducted the ceremonies. The office of phichü-u or priest was in fact normally occupied by the oldest man in the southern Angami villages; since most villagers have converted to Christianity it is now occupied by the oldest among the Krüna-nanyü. I interviewed eight themu-mia, four men and four women (see table 4.1). All of them are above fifty years of age. All are village-based except for a woman themu-mia (Vilasale), who is from Kohima town. Apart from Vilasale, whose main source of livelihood is her healing practice, the other themu-mia primarily subsist on cultivation. This also restricts their availability to clients, so they are only accessible for consultation or interviews early in the morning before they leave for their fields, unless, as some themu-mia claim, their helping spirits forewarn them about a ‘serious’ illness, in which case they will wait for the client to arrive.

The Process of Becoming a themu-mia The office of themu-mia is, broadly speaking, hereditary. For almost all the themu-mia, at least one other member of the family, either on the paternal or the maternal side, was a themu-mia. But, except for one named Dolhouvi, none of them practised simultaneously or overlapped with each other, and most took on the role only after the death of the previous themu-mia. While some were sure that they had not ‘inherited’ the helping spirits from the deceased themu-mia, one was sure that they had been inherited, while others were unsure. The link with inherited spirits seems at best uncertain. Even the themu-

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

126 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Table 4.1 List of healers Name

Gender Religion

Themu-mia 1. Dolhuovi 2. Ngulhou Theünuo

male male

Krüna Baptist

3. Vakrale 4. Vilasale Rhetsu

female female

Krüna Catholic

5. Vinolsale 6. Zao 7. Zeluovi

female male male

Catholic Krüna Krüna

Village Khonoma Kohima (originally from Dzümetouma) Kidima Kohima town (originally from Viswema) Viswema Jotsoma Kigwema

Thenupfuno and Terhuo-pe female 8. Chükhohori

now Baptist

Chumukedima town (originally from Jakhama)

Khorha bie-kelie-mia 9. Lhutonyü 10. Krulhusielie Secü 11. Sanyü

male male male

Catholic Catholic Baptist

Jotsoma Jotsoma Jotsoma

Herbalists/Masseurs 12. Amen Belhou 13. Churhü 14. Khriezolie Angami

female male male

Catholic Baptist Baptist

15. Neibu Pienyü 16. Nuothunuo 17. Niba Meyase

male female male

18. Nituo 19. Pfudinyü 20. Phono

male male female

21. Rarovilli Kuotsu 22. Rokovono Peseyie (Bano) 23. Vingol Kikhi 24. Ülieü Vinyie 25. Zakienguü Meyase 26. Zazolie Rütseno 27. Banuo 28. Savinuo (pseudonym) 29. Adinuo Solo

male female male female female male female female female

Kohima Khonoma Chumukedima town (originally from Khonoma) Kohima Baptist Revival Kohima town Baptist Kohima town (originally Catholic from Khonoma) Kigwema Revival Khonoma Baptist Jotsoma (originally from Baptist Khonoma) Jotsoma Baptist Jotsoma Baptist Viswema Krüna Khonoma Catholic Khonoma Catholic Catholic Revival Jotsoma Kohima village Revival Kohima town Revival Kohima town Revival

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 127

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

mia who did get his deceased cousin’s spirits abandoned them for a different set of spirits. According to him, his style of practising is different from his cousin’s, who also happened to be a necromancer or terhuo-pe. One cannot become a themu-mia through apprenticeship. A themu-mia is always chosen by the spirits or terhuo-mia, of which, it may be recalled (see chapter 2), there are two types: tei-rhuo-mia and ketzi-rhuo-mia. Some themumia are helped by tei-rhuo-mia while others are helped by ketzi-rhuo-mia. One of the themu-mia who had spirits from both these groups helping him gave up the ketzi-rhuo-mia, who had constantly troubled him with demands. These spirits approach the future themu-mia in anthropomorphic form, wearing Angami clothes: depending on whether they are tei-rhuo-mia or ketzirhuo-mia, the colour of their clothes is either white or black. The future themumia is thus pursued by the terhuo-mia in dreams, and also while going to the fields or the forest. Most themu-mia I interviewed said that initially they were reluctant to become a themu-mia in view of the hazards and constant confrontations with bad terhuo-mia. The case study of Zao (see figure 4.1), a themu-mia from Jotsoma village, illustrates the process of becoming a themumia as well as the career of a themu-mia: Zao, who is over fifty years old, was first contacted by ketzi-rhuo-mia when he was sixteen years old. The spirits, who wore dark clothes and looked ‘just like us’, first appeared in his dreams. Zao ignored these dreams because he was not interested in becoming a themu-mia. However, soon the ketzi-rhuo-mia began appearing to him on his way to the fields and to the forest. To avoid an encounter with them, Zao began carrying garlic which is believed to repel terhuo-mia. However, one day when Zao was returning from the fields, he was accosted by a man who was a mirror image of Zao; one of the terhuo-mia had transformed itself into Zao’s image and had been following him. Zao was then told by the terhuo-mia that it would beat him until he agreed to become a themu-mia. Zao was terrified, and since he was not carrying any garlic, he ran towards the village and entered the nearest house to get hold of some garlic. However, Zao was so frightened that he decided to spend the night in this house. When he came out of the house to relieve himself, he found that the terhuomia was still waiting for him outside. Finally, Zao gave in to the demands of the terhuo-mia, who told him that there were sick people who needed his help. Before Zao, his elder sister was said to have been contacted by the tei-rhuo-mia. However, even before she could become a themu-mia, she became mad and died. According to Zao, some other themu-mia who had been jealous of her had caused her to go mad.2 Zao is helped by eight spirits, all of whom are male, although sometimes only seven of them are there to help him. According to Zao the terhuo-mia live in the forest, water and mountains, as well as with us. They look like human beings, but from their eyes one can make out that they are not human and belong to another world; the pupils of their eyes are said to go up completely so that only the whites of the eyes are visible. Zao talks to his terhuo-mia in Angami. Terhuo-mia also have their own language which he cannot understand. According to Zao, the terhuo-mia talk in opposites – if they say good it means bad, and vice versa; similarly, when they say that the patient

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

128 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.1 Zao, the themu-mia from Jotsoma village. He was reconstructing his house; his wife can be seen in the background bent over a construction log, 2008. will get cured it means that he will die, and vice versa. Further, the terhuo-mia also calculate time differently: one day of the terhuo-mia is equal to one human year. Zao uses seven grains of rice for divination. It is through the movement of the rice grains that his terhuo-mia talk to him, reveal the cause of the sickness and tell him which point in the patient’s body is afflicted. Sometimes his spirits may ask for an offering of rice or millet beer, requiring it to be brought in by the patient or his relatives. Zao would keep the rice beer standing in its container for three days, at the end of which, depending on whether it turned sour and murky, he would predict the number of years the patient would live. According to him the rice beer will begin to smell strong as soon as the terhuo-mia taste it. As Zao is helped by ketzi-rhuo-mia – the dark, earth spirits – he uses only black fowls for offering as scapegoats. When the patient or one of his relatives bring a black fowl to Zao, the behaviour of the fowl is observed for omens. If the fowl crows and puffs up its body at the threshold of Zao’s house, it is considered a good omen; however, if it remains silent and its head droops, it indicates that the patient may not recover. When a fowl is brought to Zao, he kills it the same day; the comb, liver, wings and feet of the fowl are offered to the terhuo-mia and the rest of it is cooked and eaten. Zao eats first, followed by his family members. Zao is also said to have the ability to contact the souls of the recently dead, especially of those people who die suddenly, and inform the relatives if the dead person requires something in the next world. For this, his clients bring some rice beer and a fowl. He consumes these items at night and then talks with the soul of the dead through his terhuo-mia. When I interviewed Zao in 1985, almost ten years before the second interview in 1995, he had told me that he also practised sucking out foreign objects (stones, etc.) from the patient’s body, but now he has stopped this practice as he feels giddy while

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 129

doing it. He says that he has replaced the practice of sucking out objects with giving the patient some rice to eat, which then helps in the expulsion of the foreign objects from the patient’s stomach. Zao also practises herbal medicine; the herbal cures are revealed to him in dreams by his terhuo-mia. For the soul which has been captured by either tei-rhuo-mia or ketzi-rhuo-mia, Zao prescribes a scapegoat offering which could consist of a fowl, some pieces of iron and some tassels from the patient’s body cloth or shawl. The patient’s relatives leave the offering at a particular spot outside the village and call his name, to which the patient’s soul or ruopfü is supposed to reply. It is said that at the very moment the patient’s soul replies to the call, the patient will sit up on his bed.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Tutelary Spirits of themu-mia As we have noted above, the prospective themu-mia diviners are pursued by terhuo-mia spirits until they give in and take on the role. Most themu-mia are assisted by two or more spirits. Sometimes, the themu-mia are not very clear regarding the number of spirits who help them. For example, they would say ‘I am helped by two to three spirits’. This would sound vague to me. However, when I asked them to elaborate upon their statement, I was told that, because the spirits wander about, at any given time only a certain number of spirits would be available to help in divination. While some themu-mia are able to predict without all their helping spirits being present, others require the full set of spirits to help in the diagnoses. However, when a serious case comes to the themu-mia, all the tutelary spirits come together to help. Some themu-mia may be warned in advance by their spirits of forthcoming cases. Zelouvi,3 a well known themu-mia from Kigwema, who divided his time between cultivation and raising his cattle, said that he could know that a serious patient would come for consultation when he experienced discomfort in walking to his fields or to the forest. Another themu-mia, Vakrale, from Kidima, said that she would sometimes begin to suffer the symptoms of her patients, and thus would know that people were coming to consult her. When I went to interview them, Vakrale and Vilasale (from Kohima town), both claimed that their spirits had told them in advance that someone would come to ask all these questions!

The Process of Divination How do the themu-mia divine? There are three different methods. The most common uses grains of rice, the second uses shavings of a particular plant, and the third, which is rather recent, uses money that is offered to the themu-mia by the patient. The first method, known as keyhuo, requires the patient or his/her family members to bring some rice grains which should have been touched by the patient. The themu-mia picks up a few grains – usually four or seven – puts them in the palm of the right hand and then slightly shakes the palm. In what

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

130 A Matter of Belief

sounds like a mumble, he speaks with his terhuo-mia. Depending on the way the rice grains settle on the palm, the future of the patient is predicted and a remedy is prescribed. It is said that if the rice grains settle close to each other it is a good omen; if they scatter, or if one grain separates from the rest, it is a bad omen and the patient may even die. Another way of divining is called thuophi. For this, the stem of a plant, known as ciesenha, is shaved using a machete or dao. Each shaving is dropped onto the ground, and the omen is read depending on whether the slices fall on the freshly cut side or the other, on top of each other or not. It is a good omen when the shavings fall on top of each other. Hutton also mentioned this form of divination. According to him:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Taking omens by slicing of the chiese plant and watching the fall of the slices is the commonest form of all and may be seen every day in the Angami country. This method is used in hunting, warfare, in choosing the name of an infant, and on every kind of occasion … When, however, the omens are taken by someone with a particular reputation for getting true results, probably more reliance is placed on them. (Hutton 1921a: 245)

The method of using money is, as said earlier, a novel one. There is no name for it. A practitioner, Dolhouvi, a themu-mia from Khonoma village, had been a watchman at the primary healthcare centre of the village. After he retired from his service, he became a themu-mia. He used money in odd numbers – twentyone rupees, twenty-three rupees, and so on. According to him there should always be one coin in addition to notes included in the money given for divination; the odd number is essential for carrying out the conversation between him and his spirits. He touches various points on the patient’s body with the money and then throws it on the floor. The omen is read by looking at the way in which the currency notes unfold. The money is kept by the diviner. All the themu-mia use one of the above methods of divination, except Vilasale from Kohima town. In her case, the spirits inform her either in her dreams at night or early in the morning about the cases that will come to her and what kind of cures she should apply. Due to this she is able to practise her skills only in the mornings. Apparently her spirits wander away during the day. Except for Dolhouvi, the themu-mia do not charge a fixed fee for divination or the other forms of healing, herbal and bone setting, carried out by them. They accept whatever the clients offer them. According to them, their terhuomia do not allow them to charge a fee, and if they were to do so their healing powers would diminish. Even Dolhouvi claimed that the money he uses for divination is not supposed to be spent on the running of the household. I have observed that most clients give the themu-mia some money along with the rice grains which they bring for divination. Those who get cured bring gifts such as fowls, shawls and bamboo carrying-baskets. The themu-mia know about other themu-mia in the neighbouring villages; sometimes even those who are from a different Naga community. Sometimes

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Healers 131

they refer patients to such other themu-mia who (or whose helping spirits) are regarded as specialists in curing certain illnesses. The most common cure practised by the themu-mia involves making the offering known as usieshü to the terhuo-mia who has caused the illness. The term was discussed above (chapter 3) under the concept of sacrifice, and has also the connotation of ‘scapegoat’. Being always offered in exchange for the soul of the patient and depending on what the terhuo-mia suggest, an usieshü could consist simply of eggs and a few pieces of iron which are placed on a banana leaf and left near the village gate. Sometimes, a few tassels from the patient’s shawl are also included. A severe illness could even require releasing an unblemished or kemesa fowl into the forest. All these offerings are first washed with water, as the terhuo-mia would accept only clean things. The usieshü is then carried by two older relatives of the patient, who should ideally be male for a male patient, but could be of either sex for a female patient. One person carries the offering while the other carries a dao knife. Sometimes the same person may carry the offering and the dao; the offering is held in the right hand and the dao in the left. The offerings are placed either outside the khel gate or at some spot in the forest or the field, as directed by the terhuo-mia. When the offering is required to be placed outside the khel gate, it is done in the evening when all the khel members have returned from their fields. After the offering has been made, the two people return to the patient’s house and announce that ‘We have already brought him (i.e. the patient’s soul) back and hence wish him speedy recovery’. They wash their hands before entering the house and are then offered rice beer. Although I have not come across any reference to carrying the offerings as being risky or dangerous, I was told that, if found on the path, such offerings are not picked up by anyone. Most of the themu-mia are also proficient in other kinds of healing practices, such as herbal medicine, massaging, bone setting, and curing poisoning. Zelouvi, the themu-mia from Kigwema, was well known for his expertise in bone setting, curing sprains and herbal remedies (see figure 4.2). His expertise in bone setting had also been acknowledged by the staff of Kohima Naga Hospital, who sometimes consulted him on certain cases. Zelouvi had also opened a ‘clinic’ in a row of shops on the Kohima–Imphal highway (NH 39) at the edge of Kigwema village. The same complex also housed a clinic of a private biomedical practitioner. In the mornings, Zelouvi used to attend first to clients in his house and then come over to the ‘clinic’ for a short while around eight or nine o’clock in the morning. Sometimes he would ask some of his clients to accompany him to the clinic where he would give them herbal medicine, or in the case of a fracture or sprain would apply a plaster-tape to the affected part. Zelouvi used to keep the herbal medicines, plaster-tape and bandages in this sparsely furnished clinic. Besides being consulted for healing, some themu-mia are also approached for recovery of stolen property, and finding the whereabouts of thieves and lost people. Dolhuovi of Khonoma and Vilasale of Kohima gave me examples of

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

132 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.2 Zelouvi, the themu-mia from Kigwema village. The photograph was taken early in the morning when he was on his way to meet patients before taking his cattle to the forest for grazing, 1995.

certain incidents when they were contacted to detect a culprit. However, according to Dolhuovi, he had declined to do such things as he felt that it was no longer safe to do so. Pointing out a person as guilty of a crime could have dangerous repercussions. Hutton also mentioned that the Angami consulted some ‘seers’ to find ‘the whereabouts of stolen property or the name of the thief. In these cases divination by looking into a bowl of zu or other liquid is sometimes resorted to’. He further mentioned that such divination was not viewed favourably by the British administration and that ‘the seer is apt to get punished by authority for fixing guilt on innocent persons’ (Hutton 1921a: 245).

Themu-mia and Christianity As all the themu-mia are helped by tutelary spirits, it would be expected that they are all Krüna or non-Christians. However, two of the practising themumia, one woman and one man, are Christians. Another woman themu-mia, Vinosale, from Viswema, who joined the Revival Church some years ago, has stopped divining (I was told by Vilasale of Kohima that this woman was not accurate in her divination), but has continued with her practice of herbal healing and helping in childbirth as a midwife. In 1997 I was told of a woman themu-mia from Chumukedima, who was also a terhuo-pe but had converted to Christianity and left her practice. However, she had maintained that two of her

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Healers 133

helping spirits had also converted with her. Her husband who told me the story said that she had converted because she wanted ‘salvation’. Let us examine the case studies of the two Christian themu-mia. One of them, Ngulhou, is from Kohima village. He was originally from another village but moved to Kohima after his son was wrongly accused for an accidental death in his previous village, and the family was expelled from the village following Angami customary law.4 Several years ago, before he moved to Kohima (and also before he became a themu-mia), his wife fell severely ill. After trying all kinds of medicines, as a last resort they both converted to Christianity and joined the Baptist Church. However, his wife never recovered and eventually died. According to Ngulhou, the tei-rhuo-mia had been visiting him ever since he was a boy. They would visit him in the form of a white chicken, enter the house, sit under his bed and converse with him until he fell asleep. The tei-rhuomia were visible only to him. As it is considered tedious to become a themu-mia, he had kept on shrugging off their offer. At that time one of his paternal cousins was a themu-mia. Twenty years ago, after his cousin’s death, Ngulhou decided to become a themu-mia. In the beginning both tei-rhuo-mia and ketzi-rhuo-mia helped him. However, the ketzi-rhuo-mia used to trouble him all the time, so he decided to ignore them. Now only the tei-rhuo-mia help him, as they are ‘holy’ and cleaner than the other spirits. I asked him how he could be a Christian as well as a practising themu-mia. Ngulhou said that his spirits did not mind his being Christian. On the contrary, they advise him to donate to the Baptist Church a part of whatever money the patients give him. However, the members of his church are divided over the issue of his being a themu-mia. Some find the practice to be against church rules, while others feel that as long as his practice helps others there is no harm in his continuing as a themu-mia. The second case is of Vilasale of Kohima town. She became a themu-mia about twenty years ago at the age of forty. She is originally from Viswema village and after her marriage moved to Kohima town. Vilasale was the first among her family members to become a Christian. She was at first a Baptist, but when her parents became Catholic, she also changed her church affiliation. Vilasale’s father was a well-known herbalist, and she learnt herbal medicines from him. In addition she could do massaging, cure sprains, as well as help in childbirth. It was only after her father’s death that she became a themu-mia. Tei-rhuo-mia in the form of two white birds always used to visit her; they would sit under the eaves of her house and talk to her. They still visit her; sometimes in her dreams they tell her about the kind of cases that will be brought to her. They tell her the remedies only in her dreams. As her terhuo-mia go away during the daytime, she does not see divination-related cases at this time. According to her, being Christian does not affect her practice as themu-mia or vice-versa. In the above two cases, one can detect a slight influence of Christian beliefs in the description of the helping spirits. The first themu-mia very clearly told me that his spirits are holy and clean. However, there is a possibility of ambiguity because the Angami term for the English words, ‘clean’ and ‘holy’ is

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

134 A Matter of Belief

one – kemesa. And also, because out of the two kinds of terhuo-mia, the teirhuo-mia who help both these themu-mia are traditionally considered to be ‘cleaner’ than the ketzi-rhuo-mia. With the spread of Christianity, it is not unusual to come across instances where, except for the themu-mia, the whole family has converted to Christianity. All the family members of Zelouvi, except his two sons, have done so, but he could not according to his own judgment because he was a themu-mia. The other case is of Zao, the themu-mia of Jotsoma village. I had interviewed him in 1985 and went to his house to interview him again in 1995. I could not meet him immediately as he had gone away to harvest his fields; however, I ended up talking to his wife, who told me that Zao had become Christian. I was a little taken aback. Later, another person from the same village told me that he had persuaded Zao to join the Revival Church, and although Zao had agreed to do so, he never attended the church services. However, a few days later, when I met Zao, he told me that he had indeed considered conversion, but his spirits, who are ketzi-rhuo-mia, did not allow him to become a Christian. However, Zao’s wife and all his children are Christian. His wife is Baptist, but some of his children (he has eight) are Catholic.5 Another case I came across was of the themu-mia cum terhuo-pe in Chumukedima (discussed more below). In her case when she converted to Christianity, two of her tutelary spirits who were tei-rhuo-mia remained with her and were said to have accepted her change of faith. However, her third tutelary spirit, a ketzi-rhuo-mia, left her upon her conversion to Christianity. Again, it seems easier to convert with the ‘clean’ than the ‘dark, earthy’ spirits. Sometimes there are ingenious attempts to redefine divinational healers according to the religious status of those close to them. I came across a case in which the son, a practising Christian, maintained that his mother was not a themu-mia. The son had clearly followed in the healing tradition but was a herbalist and masseur, with intentions of opening a herbal clinic and training school for teaching herbal medicine. His mother was known as a themu-mia in her native village of Khonoma. However, he spoke of her as a herbalist who was supposedly in contact with the ‘spirit god’ or ‘Jehovah’ and whose healing talent was the gift of God. The son, who is a practising Christian, did not want to label his mother as a themu-mia, preferring to call her just a herbalist. Some Christian Angami dismiss the concept of themu-mia as an Angami superstitious belief, while others go on to narrate stories of famous themu-mia as well as terhuo-pe. Zelouvi was one Angami themu-mia who was well known and respected for his prowess in bone setting and herbal medicine. I first heard of him from some non-Angami Naga acquaintances.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 135

Succession among the themu-mia

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Zelouvi’s sudden death in March 1996 brought up the question of which one of his sons or grandsons would ‘inherit’ his talent. In October 1997, I interviewed his eldest son Atuo to find out how the legacy of themu-mia would be passed on in the family. I was also wondering whether one of the sons had acquired any talent, or if any instructions had been left by Zelouvi before his death. After the death of a themu-mia, it is not necessary for the next themu-mia in line from the family or clan to be identified soon after. Sometimes the inheritance of the ‘gift’ could jump one generation and pass on to a grandchild of either sex. In my interviews I came across several cases in which it was held that the present themu-mia had acquired the power from one of his/her grandparents or another family member. The genealogy of Zelouvi gives us an idea of this (see diagram 4.1).

Diagram 4.1 Genealogy of Zeluovi

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

136 A Matter of Belief

Zelouvi’s two sons are in fact proficient in bone setting and massaging. However, when Zelouvi was alive, they would practise only when he was not available and the patient was in need of urgent treatment; otherwise the patient would be asked to come back another time. His second son, Atuo, told me that he did not learn bone setting from his father and that this talent is a ‘gift’ from Ukepenuopfü.6 After the death of their father they began to see patients. When I asked Atuo whether his father had left any instructions for them about how to use their talents, he told me that Zelouvi appeared to him in his dreams and told him that he should help other people and work for their zevi or welfare. They do not know to whom the ‘talent’ would pass after Zelouvi. In Kigwema village, people commented that it would be one of Zelouvi’s grandchildren who would probably become a themu-mia. One of my informants from Kigwema said that according to legend, in certain Angami clans there would be gifted individuals who would become themu-mia or terhuo-pe or else would possess extraordinary physical strength. Giving an example from his own clan in Kigwema village, he elaborated that one of his grand uncles (FFBs) was known for his physical prowess during the British colonial period. However, it is also believed that those individuals who get the calling to become a themu-mia or terhuo-pe, but are unable to respond to it and utilize the gift, will become kemelo – someone who has lost the power of hearing and speech.7 Narrating a case to illustrate this, my informant, who hailed from the founder’s clan in Kigwema village, told me about his father’s brother who was thought to have nearly become a themu-mia. Several years ago, his uncle suddenly disappeared for some time, and began behaving strangely after his return. I was told that because there was nobody to guide him as to how he should perform the rituals and adhere to the code of conduct required for a proper performance of these initiatory rituals, he could not become a themu-mia. However, he continued to behave strangely for some time and it was only after he came to occupy the office of priest or kemovo of his khel that he recovered. A comparable case was of a woman from Chumukedima who was allegedly under the influence of a bad terhuo-mia (see the case study in chapter 7). She received the ‘calling’ in the form of ‘speaking in tongues’ when she was a teenager and was living with her sister in another town. According to her family, she could have utilized this gift to prophesy but she failed to do so. It was implied that, had she utilized this gift, she might not have come under the influence of the bad terhuo-mia. By not utilizing the gift bestowed on her she had apparently committed a natsei (see chapter 3) and had thus become deranged or kemelo. In Zelouvi’s case too, I was told that first it was his elder brother who received the calling to become a themu-mia. However, he was unable to perform the requisite rituals in the correct manner, and this resulted in natsei. As a result he was struck deaf and dumb. After this incident, Zelouvi began to show the signs of becoming a themu-mia. According to observers, he began to behave

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Healers 137

strangely and would sometimes talk incoherently to himself.8 He would go to the forest and perform certain rituals. However, in my interviews with him he always denied that themu-mia were required to perform any rituals before acquiring the power. Only one themu-mia, Vinosale, from Viswema, told me of this requirement and, in her case, this was simply that she had to cook a chicken in a new pot when she became a themu-mia. The relatives of another woman themu-mia from Chumukedima had also said that she used to go outside the house to perform what they called puj¯a, but they did not know what this entailed. Mills (1937: 172) mentioned a similar procedure for the initiation of the Rengma Naga divinational healers, who are supposed to sacrifice and eat a cock after the first visit by their tutelary spirits. Although among other Naga the divinational healers are associated with familiars in the form of leopard, tiger or some other animals,9 I have not come across any case of an Angami themu-mia having an animal familiar. However, I did interview an Ao Naga divinational healer, namely Talimeren from Khensa village, who told me about his tiger familiar; he also mentioned that if the tiger was killed accidentally, he would transfer his familiar from the body of the tiger into that of his pet dog. On another occasion, when I was in the Konyak Naga village of Wakching, I came across information on a woman divinational healer from the village, who was known to have a tiger as her familiar (see Joshi 1994b). In some Naga communities such as the Ao, Rengma, Lotha, Sema (Sumi) and Konyak Naga, the divinational healer is also approached to contact the souls of the dead. They are contacted by the healer going into a trance resembling ‘epileptic fits’, as also mentioned by Mills (1922, 1926, 1937), Hutton (1921b) and Smith (1925). Among the Angami as well, some themu-mia are capable of contacting the souls of the recently dead. Ngulhou from Kohima and Zao from Jotsoma claim to possess such powers. But the Angami also have necromancers, known as terhuo-pe, who may or may not be themu-mia. I was given examples of some individuals who combined the role of themu-mia with that of terhuo-pe. In Jotsoma, the necromancer named Sühonuo was also a themu-mia, Chükhohori from Chumukedima also combined the two roles, and in Kohima, Ngulhou the themu-mia from R-khel claimed that his cousin, Vitosolhou-ü, was both a terhuo-pe and a themu-mia. What does this specialization of the role of necromancer, terhuo-pe, among Angami entail? Is it an explicit concern with the idea of bridging this-worldly and other-worldly concerns?

The Concept of terhuo-pe Terhuo-pe does in fact literally mean ‘one who is a bridge between this world and that of the spirits’: terhuo ‘spirit’; pe ‘bridge’ (see also Hutton 1921a: 245). However, the word pe also means ‘shivering’ or ‘trembling’, and so the term could also mean one who trembles under the influence of the terhuo-mia (see also Sekhose 1984: 229). In the formal Tenyidie language, terhuo-pe is now

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

138 A Matter of Belief

termed terhuo-pfi, which means ‘a person through whom one can speak to the dead’; the term derives from the combination of the term themu-pfhi, used in Kohima or the Northern Angami dialect, and terhuo-pe, used in the Southern Angami region. In Khonoma village the necromancer is called terhuo-khwi. Some people, especially women, have this power. After the death of a person, during the mourning period, the spirit of the dead may speak through a terhuo-pe. It is held that the passage from the world of the dead is very arduous, and that, therefore, it is generally the souls of men who speak through a terhuo-pe. A bridge is said to connect the land of the dead to that of the living. At one end of this bridge the dividing wall is said to be so high that it makes it difficult for the souls of the women and children to cross. Therefore, the souls of women and children are said to send their messages through those of the men, who have no difficulty in climbing over this wall and reaching the terhuo-pe. It is also held that the longer the person has been dead, the further away or longer removed his soul is situated on the road leading to the bridge. I was told that this is the reason why it is generally the recently dead who speak through the terhuo-pe. When I asked my informants whether souls of both the Christian and nonChristian dead make contact through the terhuo-pe, one of my informants, Nituo, a herbalist from Kigwema, elaborated that only the souls of Krüna people speak through the terhuo-pe because the souls of the Christians do not go to the same place after death as those of the Krüna.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Who Becomes a terhuo-pe? There are contradictory claims regarding what kind of person becomes a terhuo-pe. In Chumukedima village I was told that only an individual who has a very strong soul could become a terhuo-pe. In Chumukedima, the concept of sanei, in which the soul of a person who is in need of help speaks through another person who could be some distance away, is equated with that of terhuo-pe. It is held that only a person with a very strong soul would be able to receive another person’s soul. On the other hand, in Kigwema village, I was told that only those with a very weak soul become terhuo-pe as it is believed that the soul or the ruopfü of the dead person speaks through a terhuo-pe only after suppressing or taking over her/his soul. Nituo, the herbalist and bone setter from Kigwema village, narrated the case of a girl who, he believes, would have become a terhuo-pe had he not recognized the symptoms in time and suggested remedial procedures. The girl was from Jakhama village, which is about two kilometres from Kigwema. She had been taken ill suddenly. The herbal practitioners and even the medical doctors could not diagnose her illness. Her family approached Nituo for help. According to Nituo, when he saw the girl, he knew immediately what the problem was. He

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 139

recognized that the girl was exhibiting the symptoms that precede the making of a terhuo-pe. According to him it was by virtue of his own supernatural powers that he could see several spirits or ruopfü of the dead standing around the girl, waiting eagerly to speak through her. However, Nituo said that as he does not specialize in cures for these kinds of ‘illness’, he could not have sent these spirits away. So he suggested to the family that the only way to cure the girl’s illness was to call a pastor from one of the churches to pray for her. Following his suggestion, the family contacted a pastor to say a prayer for the girl. A few days later, when Nituo visited the Jakhama village for unrelated reasons, he saw the same girl on the outskirts of the village at a stream along with her peers, washing clothes. She seemed to have recovered from the illness.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Case Study of a terhuo-pe Although stories of several terhuo-pe were told to me, I was unable to meet any in person. However, I did gather information on a former terhuo-pe who lives in Chumukedima near Dimapur town. I went to meet this terhuo-pe accompanied by a friend from Chumukedima, who also helped me as interpreter. When we reached her house, we were told that the terhuo-pe, Thenupfuno (popularly known as Chükhohori), was very ill, and thus not in a condition to either meet or speak with outsiders. We were informed that she had given up the practice in 1984 when she joined the Baptist Church. I met her husband and daughter who answered my questions regarding how she became a terhuo-pe; what, if any, rituals were performed by her before going into trance when she was a practising terhuo-pe; and why they think she gave up her practice. The following case study is based on what was narrated by them. Chükhohori’s family was originally from Jakhama village situated near Kohima town, and had moved to Chumukedima in 1964. Her paternal grandfather was a themu-mia and it was only after his death when she was about fourteen years old that she became a themu-mia as well as a terhuo-pe. According to her husband, before she became a terhuo-pe, Chükhohori was contacted by two ‘angel-like’ beings known as tei-giliede-mia or teigi-rhuo-mia (see chapter 2) who came down from the sky wearing white clothes. They took her soul or ruopfü with them up into the sky. On the same night she fell ill with high fever. At the same time, she could also feel that another spirit power had come close to her. This spirit power was, supposedly, one of the terhuo-mia known as rodo. Chükhohori’s husband told me that the rodo’s spirit is akin to that of a tiger, and added that without the assistance of rodo, the terhuo-pe would be unable to perform. After this initial encounter with the two ‘angels’, about twelve terhuo-mia, a mix of sky and earth spirits, rodo being one of them, began working with Chükhohori. Three out of twelve terhuo-mia worked closely with her, acting as her assistants. One of them was rodo, who was male, and the other two were

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

140 A Matter of Belief

female. These female spirits were said to take on the role of ‘nurse’ towards her patients once Chükhohori had diagnosed the illness and prescribed a remedy. It is interesting to note that the themu-mia from Khonoma, who claims to have three tutelary spirits, had also mentioned that two of his female spirits kept watch over his patients like a ‘nurse’. On the other hand, rodo, although being one of the helping spirits, is held to be, as my informants put it, a ‘mad spirit’. I was told that if he were to get angry, he would destroy the good work of the other two female spirits; however, if rodo were to help a patient, then nothing could stop the patient from recovering. While narrating the case study, Chükhohori’s husband used the term ‘satan’ to translate rodo. He kept referring to rodo as ‘satan ruopfü’, literally meaning ‘the satan spirit’, and regarded it as belonging to the category of earth spirits. He further contrasted its qualities with those of the spirits of heaven or the sky spirits, who are regarded as good and helpful. .

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Rituals Performed by Chükhohori Chükhohori’s husband and daughter did not know what kind of rituals she would perform before going into trance as a terhuo-pe. However, they recollected that before every performance she would leave the house and would be gone for a while. On her return, she would be feverish, and in this state she told them that the ruopfü of the dead would contact her and later on during the trance would speak through her. The stage at which the ruopfü of the dead begins to speak through the terhuo-pe is called kesia khrü or kesia phou, meaning, ‘appearance of the dead’ (kesia ‘dead’, khrü ‘image’, phou ‘person’). I was told that either the terhuo-pe is contacted by the ruopfü of the dead for passing on a message to the living relatives, or the relatives may want to contact the dead for a particular reason. Depending upon who wants to contact whom, Chükhohori would follow different procedures for the performance. For the former kind of contact, the ruopfü of the dead would communicate their desire to the terhuo-pe by meeting her in the street, forest or fields. After every such encounter with the ruopfü of the dead, Chükhohori would feel feverish and very weak. She would then inform the relatives of the dead that the ruopfü of such and such person wanted to communicate with them. It is said that the dead would want to communicate with their living relatives for reasons ranging from a wrongful division among the heirs of property they had left behind, to a complaint about not getting a proper funeral. Sometimes it could also be to apprise the family of any impending danger such as an epidemic. The other way is when someone wants to contact the dead. On such occasions the terhuo-pe would first ascertain by examining omens (thuophi) whether the dead person’s ruopfü was interested in communicating with the living relatives. Chükhohori would use rice grains for thuophi. She would place the rice grains on a plate and then pick up two grains and drop them back onto the plate. She would do this twice. Then she would predict by reading the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 141

position of the rice grains, depending upon whether they fell far apart or close together. My informants were not aware as to which pattern was taken as affirmative. She would prepare for the trance only after the ruopfü of the dead confirmed that they were ready to communicate with their relatives. I was told that, unlike other terhuo-pe, Chükhohori did not drink rice beer or zutho during her trance. Instead she drank a large quantity of water. Whenever ruopfü of men spoke through her, she would give out the war cry (mekwü), which is traditionally shouted only by men. Chükhohori’s husband said that sometimes while speaking through a terhuo-pe the ruopfü might demand a chicken to eat. During and after the trance session, meat and soup may be given to the terhuo-pe to help her regain strength. Such food is called nurhaca,10 and is eaten when one feels very tired after physical work. It is said that the terhuo-pe feels very weak and exhausted after such sessions of trance. As mentioned earlier, in 1984 Chükhohori converted to Christianity and joined the Baptist Church. Upon her conversion, she decided to leave her helping spirits. But her tutelary spirits continued to stay with her until 1990. Interestingly, she told her family that while her two female helping spirits did not object to her conversion, rodo did not approve. According to her husband, Chükhohori had told her family members that she took so long to convert because she thought that leaving her spirits might make her ill. She was baptized in 1990. She apparently told her son and daughter that her two female helping spirits had also converted with her. According to her husband and daughter, Chükhohori had converted for salvation.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Method of Trance Chükhohori’s case is the nearest I have come to any ‘first hand’ information on a terhuo-pe. It is said that first the terhuo-pe becomes unconscious and at this stage needs to be fed a large amount of freshly brewed rice beer. My informants who have witnessed such trances recollect that in the middle of the trance the terhuo-pe would begin to pant and say, ‘I am thirsty, give me more zutho (rice beer) to drink’. One informant observed that even after drinking several litres of rice beer, the terhuo-pe’s stomach would not look bloated, as it would do if under normal circumstances somebody were to drink so much liquid. The ruopfü of the dead is said to enter the terhuo-pe through her toes and travel upwards to her mouth. Then the medium begins to speak in the voice of the dead person. When a man speaks through the terhuo-pe, before speaking, the terhuo-pe would give out a loud mekwü – the war cry. One of my informants, who had witnessed a trance session, said that towards the end of the trance the ruopfü of the dead would say that it needed to return to the land of the dead before sunset. Sometimes, the ruopfü of the dead would also instruct the family members and onlookers to feed the terhuo-pe a chicken, saying that she had suffered during the trance and needed

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

142 A Matter of Belief

to be given this food to revive her energy. It is said that the terhuo-pe struggle when the ruopfü speak through them and that the whole process is very tiring for them. To bring them round, khrei, a locally made yeast (which is used for brewing rice beer), is put into their mouth. In Kigwema I was told that sometimes rags may be burnt to bring the terhuo-pe out of the trance. It is believed that at times the terhuo-pe may speak out the secrets of people11 who surround her during the trance. Terhuo-pe are also mentioned by Hutton; his description tallies with what my informants who have witnessed terhuo-pe’s trance have told me. To quote Hutton:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

There are also women who answer questions from trances. They are called Terhope (‘god’s bridge’) and they go into a trance occasionally (particularly in the house of a man who has just died) falling down suddenly. From the trance they answer questions asked them, though they remember nothing on their return to consciousness. Before she can answer questions, however, it is necessary to force open the Terhope’s mouth and put into it new zu and yeast. The trance usually lasts about half an hour to an hour, and as in the case of the lycanthropists in the Sema tribe, the body aches severely on its return to consciousness. A Terhope in Jotsoma called Whelalhuwü, who was questioned when in trance (December 1914) as to the cause of illness in the village, answered that the old Naga bridge over the Dzüdza (Zubza) river should be rebuilt. (1921a: 245)

Although I have not come across any information which links the office of terhuo-pe explicitly with prescribing cures for illness, there have been cases, as mentioned earlier, in which an individual combines the roles of both themumia and terhuo-pe. The cases of well-known terhuo-pe were often narrated to me by Krüna as well as Christian informants. An incident which occurred some decades ago has gained legendary status now. A terhuo-pe (who was also a themu-mia) named Sühonou from Jotsoma village, who died in the early 1980s, had been famous for her trances. It is said that during one of the active phases of the insurgency movement in the 1970s, she was consulted by the members of the Naga Federal Army, an underground outfit, to locate their missing comrade after their encounters with the Indian Army troops in the jungles. She is said to have spoken out in the voice of the missing comrade and to have narrated the incident of the encounter, as well as pointing out the exact spot in the jungle where the body could be found. In addition to the divinational healers, almost every khel in an Angami village has herbalists, masseurs and people who are capable of taking out fish bones stuck in the throat – a not uncommon problem among a people who eat small river fish. I shall now discuss how these practitioners acquire their power to heal and what kind of healing is carried out by them. Do these nondivinational healers have a different relationship to Christianity?

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 143

Non-divinational Healers

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Khorha bie-kelie-mia Besides the themu-mia, who are characterized by the particular method of divination and are said to have tutelary spirits, there is another type of healers who are considered as experts in taking out a fish bone stuck in the throat. They are called khorha bie-kelie-mia. The term refers to the method by which the power is acquired and what it entails; khorha ‘river otter’; bie-kelie ‘to touch lightly’; and mia ‘person’. So the term means ‘one who has acquired the light touch by killing an otter’. It is believed that anyone who could kill a river otter by biting its neck, without the use of any weapon, would acquire the power to alleviate suffering caused by fish bones or bones of any animal which may get stuck in the throat of a person. It is also held that the person who acquires this power to extract the fish bones from the throat would never suffer from the same trouble. I did not come across any case of women who may have acquired this power. Its acquisition seems to be confined to men, as hunting is predominantly a male activity. There is usually one such specialist in each village. I met three in Jotsoma village – Sanyü, Krulhusielie Secü and Lhutonyü. In other villages, although I heard that there were such specialists, I was not able to meet them. For Sanyü, who is now about sixty-five years old, it was a chance killing of an otter when he was in his early twenties that resulted in his acquiring the power to heal. One day while returning from the field, he saw an otter with its lair near a stream. He remembered what his mother had told him about acquiring curing powers by killing an otter in a certain way. So he caught the otter from behind and bit its neck and killed it. Sanyü told me that he did not perform any rituals or observe taboos on his return to the village with the dead otter. According to him there is also no prohibition on eating the meat of the otter. He did not advertise his successful killing of the otter; nevertheless, as people gradually came to know about the killing, they began consulting him for removing fish bones stuck in the throat. On the other hand, the other two specialists in Jotsoma, Krulhusielie Secü and Lhutonyü, had gone intentionally to the stream to hunt for an otter because they wanted to acquire the power. Krulhusielie acquired the power in 1976 at the age of twenty-five, and Lhutonyü12 in 1955 at the age of fifty. Although Sanyü could not recall performing any special ritual after the killing of the otter, the other two – Krulhusielie Secü and Lhutonyü – told me that they had to observe certain taboos and perform some rituals. According to them, the person who kills the khorha is not supposed to eat its meat. In addition the person is tabooed or kenyü to eat the meat of any other animal he may have killed on that day, as it is believed that a breach of this kenyü would make him unable to hunt those animals again. Sanyü did not have to observe any of these taboos and he said that he had consumed the meat of the otter he had killed.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

144 A Matter of Belief

Upon his return to the village after killing the khorha, the person is supposed to drink water from a cup made of two leaves of thiese plant. The stem of this plant, as mentioned earlier, is also used for taking omens. The Procedure for Cure For taking out fish bones, or for that matter any other bone which is stuck in the throat, the healer strokes the neck of the patient gently in a downward direction saying, bie wa te ho, meaning ‘it has been already taken out’. After this the patient is given either something to drink, such as rice beer or tea, or some boiled rice to eat, to make sure that the bone has slipped down. According to Sanyü, it is quicker for him to extract a fish bone than a bone of any other animal. As this is considered a gift or power bestowed by god, the healers do not charge any fees. However, they do accept gifts that a patient may offer them upon being cured. Krulhusielie said that they do not know when god might take the power away, so this gift for curing is to be used for zevi, that is for the welfare of others. All three practitioners had acquired the power when they were still Krüna. The practitioners told me that it was generally held among the Krüna that conversion to Christianity would make such power for healing ineffective. In the beginning they themselves had also thought that their power to heal would be lost upon conversion, but this did not happen. Sanyü converted to Christianity in 1957; he is a Baptist Christian. The other two healers converted in the 1980s and are members of the Catholic Church.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Herbalists and Masseurs Every Angami village has some herbalists and masseurs known as daru-kesimia: the word d¯aru is taken from Nagamese, and originally derives from the Urdu expression dav¯a-d¯aru meaning ‘medicine’; kesi-mia means ‘person who knows’. Some of the healers who are massage specialists are also known as nabhi ¯¯ (a Hindi word meaning ‘navel’) or navel setters, while others are called nadi ¯¯ (a Hindi word meaning ‘pulse’) or unounya, literally ‘pulse specialist’. Khriezolie is also a nadi ¯¯ specialist. I was able to interview several of them (see table 4.1). A small number of these healers have left their natal villages and have moved to the townships. In some cases the children of established healers have also taken up healing as either a full-time or part-time profession. While some of the traditional practitioners are illiterate, others are educated and work in the state government offices or teach in a school. Most of the healers consider their healing talent to be a gift from god, whom they address as Ukepenuopfü. In some case studies, the description of Ukepenuopfü comes close to the Krüna concept of the sky spirits, who are held as benign and are believed to dress in white clothes.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 145

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

First, let us take the case of Rokovono Peseyie, popularly known as Bano, who is a member of the Baptist Church and is said to possess a special gift for healing: Bano, aged about twenty-five, works as a cook in Kohima Science College hostel. According to her it was in the year 1984 that she received her ‘gift’ or the ‘power to heal’ from god, whom she referred to as Ukepenuopfü throughout the interview. Bano said that in her dreams god had told her that she should begin using her gift of healing to help people, otherwise she would be punished.13 Before Bano started her practice she used to get recurrent dreams in which she would see patients coming to her for treatment. An elderly man in white robes, who seemed to her like ‘god’, would instruct her on how to heal the patients. Sometimes she would only hear a voice giving her instruction that was, according to her, the voice of god or Ukepenuopfü. These dreams, though not identical in details, had the common theme of seeing a patient who would be ill in a different part of the body in each of these dreams. Her dreams always concluded with her pouring water on the patient, which was followed by the patient getting up from the bed and running away saying ‘Praise the Lord’. These dreams recurred for two months. A few days after the dreams had stopped, her neighbour’s father hurt his thumb. It was then that she remembered the dreams she had been having in the past two months. She massaged her neighbour’s injured thumb and was able to cure the injury. Later she told her grandfather about the incident and her dreams. Her grandfather admonished her for not telling him about her dreams earlier. However, feeling shy, she did not want to come out in the open about her gift of healing. Keeping this under wraps for seven years, she began to practise only after the prayer group from her church requested her to take up the task of healing others and to use this gift given to her by god. After some people got to know about her talent they encouraged her to come out and practise it. Moreover, some members of her church also prophesized that she had healing powers. Interestingly, she is the first one in her family to have such a ‘gift’. She mainly makes use of massaging to cure different kinds of disorders and sometimes gives herbal medicines for certain ailments. She told me that by touching the body of the patient she can diagnose the illness. By placing her hands on the back and the shoulders of a person she comes to know whether the person has a heart complaint. She uses a kind of oil that she called ‘Burmese oil’ for massage. According to her, it is imperative to apply oil on the palms before touching the body. She also uses herbs for curing, which she collects from the nearby forest. She experimented with the herbs on herself first. After about two years, she began to give these herbal medicines to her clients. According to her, almost 90 per cent of her patients get cured through a combination of her massage and herbs. Some of her clients come to her after being disappointed with the treatment provided at the Kohima Civil Hospital. Some people come to her for special blessings for which she prays by reciting verses from the Bible. Generally patients come to her in the morning between 9.30 and 11.30 A.M. Before diagnosing the illness, she prays for the patient. Like most other healers she does not charge any fee from her patients as her talent for healing is a gift from god, and thus it ought to be practised in accordance with the concept of zevi or welfare. Her clients, upon cure, bring her gifts as a gesture of gratitude – and she accepts such gifts, which may be either in cash or kind.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

146 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Another case is of Nituo, a sixty-year-old herbalist and bone setter, which further illustrates the relationship between the spirits and the herbalists: Nituo, a retired school teacher in Kigwema, began practising herbal healing in 1983, thirty years after it had been prophesized by a group of women who had come to Kigwema village on a revival crusade in 1953 that he would receive talent for healing from god. Nituo is a member of the Revival Church that he joined in 1964. He is also one of the office holders in the Revival Church, but he does not go to all the Sunday services. One of his brothers is a pastor in the same church. Nituo says that some of prayer group members of the Revival Church came to know of his talents through their vision during the prayer session and urged him to start practising. After this he began to practise herbal medicine and bone setting/massaging. Sometimes during the interviews with him, Nituo called himself a themu-mia. On one occasion, while narrating the incident of a girl from Jakhama village who was thought to be on the verge of becoming a terhuo-pe, he said that because he is a themu-mia he could see the souls of the dead who were waiting in her room. However, he is not recognized as a themu-mia by the villagers, who know him as a daru-kesi-mia, the term for a herbalist. Interestingly, Nituo is also related to Zeluovi: his paternal grandmother was Zeluovi’s older sister. Nituo has a good knowledge of the spirit world of the Angami and was one of my main informants in Kigwema village. Before he started his herbal and massage practice, he used to hear voices, which according to him were the whisperings of terhuo-mia. These terhuo-mia apparently also foretell him about patients coming for consultation; before any serious case, he gets a vision of the patient. Nituo claims that by merely looking at the patient he can tell what is wrong with him/her. When he is attending a patient, the terhuo-mia speak in his ears, instructing him which medicine to use. Sometimes Nituo seemed to imply that the spirit that helped him was the Holy Spirit, and his reason for being a member of the Revival Church was the proximity he felt to the Holy Spirit during the church service. According to him, his helping spirit does not like him to hold any office in the village. As a result, when he was selected as the village chairman of Kigwema, after just one week he had to step down from the post. He says that new knowledge of herbal remedies for certain illnesses is revealed to him in dreams. Interestingly, he claims that he knows of a herbal cure for addiction,14 that is supposed to be similar to the one used against a love charm. According to him, the logic behind both love charms and drug taking is similar: both tend to overpower the logic of the individual and make them either addicted to drugs, or fall hopelessly for a person. The medicine helps to undo this addiction. The antidote to love charm is called kemoprü, literally meaning ‘other than what is wanted’. Because Nituo knows which ingredients are used for making the charm, he claims that he can make the antidote to undo the effect of the addictive charm. He collects plants for the medicines from the slopes of Japfu mountain, a source for medicinal herbs for other practitioners from Southern Angami region as well. Some of these practitioners who go hunting on Japfu mountain know the flora on the mountain very well. Like other healers who consider their talent as a gift from god, Nituo does not charge any fixed fee from his patients, but accepts the gifts brought by his clients as a gesture of thanks after they have been cured.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 147

Another well-known practitioner who I interviewed was Ülieü Viyie, a herbalist and masseuse from Thevoma-khel of Khonoma village (see figure 4.3):

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

When I met her in 1996, she was about sixty years old and had been practising traditional medicine for more than twenty-five years. She began her practice after all her children had been born. She converted to Christianity in the 1970s, and as a part of her healing before treating the patients she prays to God. In her family, her maternal grandmother, who was from a neighbouring village of Mezoma, was an expert in traditional healing. According to Ülieü, people always tell her that she has inherited the talent from her grandmother. However, she maintains that although she may have received the innate talent from her grandmother, she did not learn herbal cures and massaging from her, and that this talent is a gift from Ukepenuopfü/God. Like Nituo and Bano, she also claims that she can guess a patient’s illness by just looking at the face. Her mainstay is massaging, which she uses for curing women’s ailments related to the uterus and stomach. Mainly women come to her with complaints related to abdominal pain, uterus dislocation, pregnancy and childbirth.15 According to her, because women carry out the heavy agricultural work their womb or uterus becomes distended and shifts from its normal position, thus causing discomfort. She pulls it back to the normal position by massage. After the massage she gives herbal medicines which are prepared by mixing various roots and leaves. Normally the medicine is prescribed for about one to two weeks, but in serious cases she recommends it be taken for up to two months. She is well known as a midwife too, and claims to have delivered almost 90 per cent of the babies in her khel. Earlier she used to go to the client’s house for delivery,

Figure 4.3 Ülieü Viyie, a herbalist and masseur from Thevoma-khel of Khonoma village, 1995.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

148 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.4 Herbal medicines used by Ülieü Viyie of Khonoma village. She collects them from the forest during the season and stores the dried herbs in plastic bags, 1995. but after she met with an accident in 1995, her mobility has become restricted, and now the women come to her house for treatment and delivery. According to her, those patients who have not been able to get cured after hospitalization also consult her. Sometimes she is even taken to the hospital to see the patient by the patient’s relatives. Similar incidents were narrated to me by Niba and Zelouvi; when patients do not show much sign of recovery their relatives take these traditional healers to the hospital to give advice, as well as to perform massage and administer medicine. All this is generally done surreptitiously so that the doctors in the hospital do not come to know. For making the medicines, Ülieü gathers herbs from the forests around Khonoma village. As these herbs and roots are to be collected in certain seasons only, she keeps a stock of herbs which are kept wrapped in polyethylene bags (see figure 4.4). Some of the herbs which are used frequently by her, she grows in the kitchen garden and on the masonry wall which separates compounds between houses that are situated on different levels. For some of her treatments she needs certain special roots from the forests which she is now unable to procure because of her restricted movement after she broke her thigh bone in the accident. Because of her physical condition, and with a view to passing on the knowledge of herbal medicine, she is training one of her daughters (who is mute). Ülieü told me specifically that she is not helped by the spirits or terhuo-mia and her healing powers, as said earlier, are a gift of god. She further elaborated that there are two types of healers: firstly, those who are helped by the spirits, and second, those who have the gift naturally, as an innate talent.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 149

Methods of Healing and Medicine Used by Healers

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The herbalists and masseurs use a variety of ointments for the purpose of massaging. Mustard oil or m¯ıth¯a tel (a Nagamese term that is taken from Hindi meaning ‘sweet oil’) is used by almost all of them. Some use pain-relieving ointments such as ‘tiger balm’ or ‘voltaic balm’, which are Ayurvedic ointments. One young woman healer, namely Amen from Kohima village, uses ‘paralite’ oil for massaging and ‘relaxol’ ointment for treating dislocations and sprains. These she buys at the local pharmacy. She first feels the affected area with both hands and then applies the ointment. Thereafter she uses crepe bandage to tie around the affected area. Another practitioner from Jotsoma uses ‘Burmese oil’ that contains menthol and eucalyptus oil for massaging the affected area. Zelouvi, the themu-mia and bone setter, used to spit on the affected part of the patient’s body and then massage it with his hands. I observed him doing this when checking a client’s back, and on another occasion whilst checking a child’s stomach. I also observed some of the healers – Vilasale, Niba, Zakienguü and Banuo – applying mustard oil to their palms before touching the area of patient’s body that needed massaging (see figure 4.5). Niba, a young herbalist and masseur, originally from Khonoma and now practising in Kohima, has a clinic in a shopping complex close to the Kohima village in Kohima. He learned herbal medicines from his mother, Zakienguü,

Figure 4.5 Banuo, herbalist and masseuse from Kohima village, seen here attending to a friend of mine. After a prolonged illness, and having spent several days at the prayer centre in Kohima, Banuo acquired the gift to heal others. I met her at the Kohima local ground where she was attending the wrestling match as a ‘physiotherapist’ to one of the wrestlers, 2008.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

150 A Matter of Belief

who is a well-known practitioner in Merhema-khel in Khonoma village. Niba’s expertise in setting dislocations and curing muscle pulls is self-taught. He uses mustard oil for massaging to treat complaints related to stomach and womb or uterus, otherwise he uses a different oil that he buys from the pharmacy. For treating dislocations he uses the fat of python, flying fox and bear.16 He uses the skin of flying fox for treating burns by charring the fur and applying the ashes to the burnt skin. In fact several healers use the gall bladder and fat of the bear for treating fractures and dislocations. Chürhu, a bone setter from Khonoma, used to use tiger fat for treating dislocations as well as fractures. It is held that tiger fat helps in speedy healing of fractures. According to Chürhu, until recently,17 he had been using the fat procured from the tiger he had killed in 1957. Some healers have developed their own unique method of treating certain illnesses. I happened to observe Niba perform a kind of vacuum suction on a teenage boy who was suspected of suffering from jaundice. Niba made a cone out of a square piece of paper and closed the pointed tip with candle wax. Then the boy was asked to lie down on his right side. Niba placed the paper cone vertically covering the left ear of the boy and enclosed its base with a towel. Then he lit the pointed tip with a matchstick. After a few seconds he extinguished the flame and gently removed the cone. We could see a circle of fine honey coloured sticky powder in and around the boy’s ear. Niba asked the boy to get up and then took him to the balcony behind his clinic and gently cleaned his ears. He gave him a certain tonic as medicine and suggested that the boy should come back in a week or ten days time. Another healer who has developed her own way of healing is Nuothonuo of Kohima. She is a young woman who began her practice in 1989. She makes use of candles and bandages besides massage in her treatment. She places a lighted candle on the abdomen of the patient and then covers it with a cup. Sometimes, in the case of children who come with complaints of abdominal pain, she wraps bandages around the patient’s abdomen and leaves these on for two to three days. Besides recommending rest for a few weeks after the treatment, she suggests certain dietary restrictions, such as abstinence from eating eggs, yam, and food cooked in mustard oil. According to her, the abdominal pain is caused by the dislocation of luo (navel) which could move upwards, downwards or sideways from its normal position (my interpreter, a medical student, translated it as the ‘vitello-intestinal duct’). Acquisition of Healing Powers As indicated earlier, some of the herbalists and masseurs are said to have received the talent from somebody in their family. Their case studies point to their being helped by spirits and having a natural flair for massaging and bone setting. The idea that a spirit is helping them in their healing is shared by the Krüna and the Christians. The Christian concept of angels seems to have

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Healers 151

parallels with the traditional belief in tei-giliede-mia, or the sky spirits, who are helpful to men. Some of the healers, namely Niba, Niebu and Amen, say that they learnt the art of massaging on their own, adding that it is a talent which has to come from within and cannot be learnt just by watching or through apprenticeship. All the healers had at first experimented with the massaging as well as the herbal medicines on themselves. Practitioners such as Niba, Pfudinyü, Amen and Niebu said that they first tried treating their own injuries (sports injuries in the case of men) and later gradually began to treat their peers and neighbours. Once people came to know that they could cure sprains and dislocations they began coming to them.18 Nuothonuo, the woman healer from Kohima, said that although she learnt the art of massaging on her own, her becoming a healer was related to an illness episode in her childhood. When she was ten years old, she fell very ill and had to be admitted to the hospital. She remained ill for three months, after which she was ultimately cured by an old woman who massaged her. According to her it was then that she came to know that one can be cured through massaging. A few years after this incident, when her paternal uncle had a back problem, she experimented by massaging and rubbing his back and was able to cure him. After this she used this technique on some more people and gradually became known for her healing abilities. She practises part-time, as most of her day is spent running a ‘rice-hotel’, an eating place, with her mother. In the case of some herbalists and masseurs there has been at least one other member in their lineage who has had the power to heal. Some of these healers are also descendants of a themu-mia. Khriezolie of Chumukedima village (originally from Khonoma) learnt his lore from his mother who was a themumia.19 For some healers, it is said that they have inherited the ‘gift’ to heal from a family member who had similar talent. As noted above, thus Ülieü of Khonoma village seems to have gained the talent from her grandmother who was originally from Mezoma village and was a well-known herbalist and masseur. Niba, who has now moved to Kohima, is said to have acquired the talent from his mother Zakienguü who lives in Khonoma and is known for her massaging, midwifery and herbal medicine. In fact Niba’s elder brother was also known for his ability to set bones and cure sprains. And it was after his death that Niba began to practise. In every village, it will be recalled, there are traditional healers who specialize in one type of healing or another. These healers belong to different khel, therefore they have different sets of clients. For example, Ülieü of Thevoma khel caters mainly to people from her own khel and to those who come to her from other villages; similarly, Zakienguü’s clientele is from Merhema-khel of Khonoma village. Besides these healers, there are a very small number of practitioners who practise medicine that combines their knowledge of traditional herbal remedies with other forms of medicine, such as homeopathy and Ayurveda. Zazolie

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

152 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.6 Zazolie Rütseno of Jotsoma village practises a mix of herbal medicines and homeopathy. He was a laboratory assistant in the biology department at the Kohima Science College. In the background is the old stone fortification of khel-1 which has remained as such since colonial times, and is mentioned in J.H. Hutton (1921), 2008.

Rütseno (see figure 4.6) of Jotsoma village is the only person I have met who had been practising a mix of herbal medicines and homeopathy. He worked as a lab assistant in the biology department at the Kohima Science College, which is located close to Jotsoma village. Compared to other healers, Zazolie has learnt herbal and non-herbal medicine by asking village elders about home remedies and making notes about them. He has also used his training as a botany lab assistant to increase his knowledge of medicinal plants. Zazolie is also very enthusiastic about learning traditional herbal remedies from others, and keenly exchanges information on medicinal plants. He also exchanged information with me and took a note of the remedies I told him about from my region. In addition, he learnt homeopathy by reading books and doing a course called HMS from Calcutta. He began practising in 1981. According to him homeopathy provided a new form of medicine for people in his village. He likes to practise homeopathy because the medicine is in the form of sweet pills that are easy to swallow and, unlike allopathic medicine, do not have any side effects. He has found homeopathy to be useful in treating gastric ulcers, tonsillitis, appendix pains and malarial fever. Zazolie has his ‘clinic’ in a separate room in his house in Jotsoma village. He keeps different kinds of syrups and tonics inside a glass cabinet. He charges a fixed price for his medicine. For homeopathy, the charges were between ten

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Healers 153

and thirty rupees in the 1990s. For herbal medicine he has different rates for different tonics, and they are priced higher than the homeopathic medicines. Similarly, Niba, who has converted a shop space in a row of shops into a ‘clinic’ in Kohima, keeps different kinds of tonics and herbal medicines in the form of powder and syrup. These he sells at a fixed price from five rupees upwards. Generally medicine is dispensed for what is called ‘gastric’ complaint or acidity. Herbal infusion made from a mixture of powdered leaves and roots is the most popular form of medicine. Other practitioners also charge a fee for herbal medicine, but they do not charge any money for massaging. There is an exchange of information on medicine between healers. Dolhuovi, the themu-mia from Khonoma, told me that he had learnt some of the herbal cures from herbalists from Manipur and Phek, a Chakhesang Naga region. Dolhuovi also said that he exchanged his information on herbal remedies to learn how to cure snake bites. Vingol, a snake-bite curer (who is also a trained veterinary specialist) from Viswema village, had learnt the lore from his father who was known for curing snake bites. Those healers who live in the town buy herbal medicine from their village-based counterparts. Niba, besides making his own medicine also uses the herbs collected by his mother Zakienguü in Khonoma, and Khriezolie of Chumukedima buys herbal medicines from Ülieü of Khonoma. It must be mentioned that some herbalists and masseurs (as well as some themu-mia) have learnt part of their medicine and massaging techniques from healers in other parts of Nagaland during their service in the underground Naga Army. A masseur and n¯abhi setter mentioned that he had learnt to cure sprains and dislocations by massage from the traditional healers he came into contact with in the 1960s when he was serving in the same army. Almost all the herbalists and masseurs I met were Christians, though belonging to different churches. A few of them have moved their affiliation from one church to another, for example Zazolie. He was at first a Baptist, but then moved to the Christian Revival Church. According to him it was the ‘spiritual’ aspect of the Revival Church that made him feel closer to the Holy Spirit and that induced him to change his affiliation. Niebu, the masseur from Kohima village, also moved from Khedi Baptist Church to the Baptist Revival Church. He is the only one from his family who belongs to this church, his parents being Khedi Baptist. According to him the Revival Church provides a feeling of closeness to the Holy Spirit which he did not feel as a member of the Baptist Church. He appreciates the Revival church service and prophecy by the prayer group. Pointing to the Corinthians II chapter in the Bible, he added that they read these verses which relate to the Holy Spirit. Some healers, like Amen of Kohima, changed their affiliation from one church to another after their marriage, to follow their husbands’ church. Nituo of Kigwema is an office holder in the Revival Church. Like other healers, he also emphasizes the close relationship with the Holy Spirit that he feels as a member. Narrating some cases where an illness was cured by the offering of prayers in the ‘prayer house’

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

154 A Matter of Belief

or church, he said that he strongly believes in the Revival Church’s prayer groups and their efficacy in healing through prayers.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Interaction between Traditional Healing Practices and Other Forms of Medicine When pluralistic healing traditions exist, it is interesting to observe what kinds of situation inform an interaction between these systems. I noticed that none of the masseurs undertook cases which in their view needed the attention of a medical doctor. During my interview with Niebu, a masseur from Kohima village who works in the state government office, a woman came to him with a complaint regarding one of her fingers that was swollen and painful. Niebu felt the finger and said that it seemed like an extra growth of the bone and suggested that she should consult a doctor, as surgery might be needed to correct it. There have been cases where a traditional healer has been contacted for certain remedies by doctors. Niba, who has a ‘clinic’ in Kohima, is often contacted by doctors for treating cases of sprains and muscle pull. One of the cases Zelouvi (of Kigwema) had treated in the early 1970s has reached a legendary status. It was just after the 1971 Bangladesh war when a highranking army officer was hurt and suffered a compound fracture of his thigh bone. The hospitals were unable to do much for him, and ultimately his colleagues, who had heard of Zelouvi during their posting at Jakhama army camp, sent for him. The story goes that Zelouvi was taken to the hospital in Madras in an army helicopter. There he was able to treat the officer successfully by using his herbal medicines and complementary technique of bone setting. As a token of recognition of his talent, Zelouvi had access to the bandages and plasters at the army dispensary, which he used for treating fractures and dislocations. Earlier he was given these free of cost, but later on he had to buy them from the army dispensary. However, the exchange is not one way. When Ülieü of Khonoma suffered a multiple fracture on her leg in a jeep accident in May 1995, while on her way to Kohima town to see a patient, she was taken to the Kohima Civil Hospital. Ülieü told me that the condition of her leg was so bad that she could not have treated the wounds with her own medicines.20 At the hospital she underwent an operation in which a steel rod was inserted inside her thigh bone. It may be mentioned that when Zeluovi suffered a cardiac arrest and went into a coma, he was immediately rushed to the Kohima Civil Hospital; however, he did not survive the attack. Not all of the traditional healers respond in a positive way towards this interaction between traditional and Western forms of healing. An incident was narrated to me about Dolhuovi, the themu-mia from Khonoma village. In the early 1990s his wife broke her leg by slipping on the path on her way to the fields. She went to the primary healthcare centre in the village to seek medical help. When Dolhuovi came to know about it he became angry that his wife had

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Traditional Healers 155

opted for modern medical treatment instead of seeking his help. However, his wife still went ahead and received treatment at the primary healthcare centre.21 What happens when a traditional healer needs treatment for an illness? In certain cases, such as that of Ülieü, the person may seek treatment in the hospital. Most healers use their own herbal medicines. However, when help is needed for the treatment of sprains and muscle pull or fracture, the healers may seek help from others in their profession. For his own sports-related injuries, which require massaging of the back, Neibu of Kohima village used to consult either Zelouvi or Nituo of Kigwema. However, he preferred Nituo to Zelouvi. Niba, the other masseur, also used to go to Zelouvi for treatment. Sometimes the healers may refer their clients to other healers if they think they themselves will be unable to cure them. Neibu, who deals only with minor fractures as he says he is not confident of his ability to fix major fractures, used to refer complicated cases to Zelouvi or Nituo. Even among the themumia, one themu-mia could refer his client to another healer if he thinks that the case is beyond his scope. Zelouvi told me that he did not have the expertise to cure poisoning, and would therefore refer any clients who showed symptoms of poisoning to the healers in Kekrima and Puroba villages, who were experts in treating such cases. Several cases were told to me in which, upon the failure of the medical treatment at the hospital, the patient was brought to a traditional healer. Ülieü, Zelouvi, Nuothunuo, Niba and Nituo all said they had been successful in treating cases where the doctors had given up. Ülieü reminisced that some years ago she was taken to Kohima to see a baby who had stopped stool and urinating, and the doctors were unable to do anything. She massaged the baby’s stomach, whereupon it began to cry and then passed urine, and subsequently became well. In another case she was taken to see a middle-aged man from Mediziphema. When she saw him she thought that she would not be able to help at all as the man had suffered from a paralytic attack that had left one side of his body immobile. The doctors did not know how to treat him. Ülieü checked his pulse and found it to be irregular. She massaged his neck and the arch of the back, and then applied hot and cold herbal medicine alternately. She said that she still wonders how she was able to cure him. From the discussion of the case studies mentioned above, one may summarize that, among the Angami, on the one hand there exist diviners who are helped by their tutelary spirits, while on the other, there are a plethora of healers who combine herbal medicine with massaging. Interestingly, as the case studies have revealed, a number of herbalists and masseurs see their talent as a gift from God, which if not utilized for the welfare of people could lead to divine punishment. From the case studies it is also apparent that a number of healers who are Christian emphasize the help they receive from God (Ukepenuopfü) and the Holy Spirit in their healings, which reflects the traditional Angami belief in helpful spirits of the sky (teigi-rhuo-mia).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

156 A Matter of Belief

In spite of the conversion of most Angami to Christianity, the role of themumia has survived and, as we have seen above, in recent years an interesting phenomenon of Christian themu-mia has surfaced – a clear illustration of how new and old beliefs are accommodated. In the last two decades there has also been a proliferation of Christian denominations, mainly Revival and Pentecostal, that place considerable stress on healing through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. In the following chapters, therefore, I focus first on the introduction of Christianity to the Naga in order to elicit the role that healing played at the time Christianity was introduced, and then I discuss the various denominations that are represented in Kohima. Finally I discuss the role of the Christian Church in healing, focusing on faith healing and prayer groups, as well as on the role of the church in dispensing allopathic and Ayurvedic medication.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Hutton collected most of his data from Khonoma village. In the Angami dialect that is spoken in Khonoma, the word mia is pronounced ma. 2. This is the only instance I have come across where a themu-mia has been accused of killing a novice. 3. He was a famous themu-mia, known for his herbal medicine and skill in bone setting. He died in 1996. 4. The various Naga communities of the state are allowed to practise their customary law to solve intra-as well as inter-village disputes (see chapter 1). 5. Among the Angami, it is not uncommon to find members of a family following different Christian denominations (see chapter 6). 6. Before the coming of Christianity, God was spoken of as terhuo-mia by the Krüna; however, these days the term Ukepenuopfü is used instead (see also chapter 2). 7. Mills mentioned a comparable event when writing about a Lotha Naga healer who, upon breach of a taboo, was said to have gone mad and died (1922: 164). 8. Writing about the Lotha Naga medicine men (ratsen), Mills also mentioned that, ‘anyone, man or woman, is liable to develop the symptoms which are associated with ratsen. The person affected falls into a fit at the dark of the moon … when a man shows these symptoms for the first time an experienced ratsen is called in to diagnose the case. If he proclaims it to be genuine then he strangles a cock’ (1922: 164). 9. See Mills 1922: 164; 1926: 244–45; Fürer-Haimendorf 1939; Joshi (Patel) 1994b. Of course, the phenomenon is well known in South America where the shamans have jaguars as their familiars (for examples, see Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975; Hugh-Jones 1979). 10. Nurhaca is eaten after any exhausting work, which could be after working in the field or after having travelled the whole day. A friend’s mother in Kohima village used to serve us such a meal, comprising curry of boiled dried beef with rice, when we came back to the house after a whole day of interviewing in the village. 11. One of my interpreters, a friend, was very apprehensive of taking me to a woman in Kohima village who was said to be a themu-phfi or terhuo-pe, because she was afraid that the woman might speak out secrets relating to her personal life in front of others and cause her embarrassment. 12. I interviewed Lhutonyü in 1985 during my M.Sc. fieldwork (see Joshi 1985–86, 1986). He died sometime in the late 1980s.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Traditional Healers 157

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

13. Similar accounts were narrated to me by Nituo of Kigwema, and also by an informant in Chumukedima village, regarding the consequences of not using their talents. 14. In the past fifteen years there has been an increased incidence of drug abuse among the youth in Nagaland, and during my fieldwork I came across a few cases of death by drug overdose. Drugs, mainly heroin or ‘brown sugar’, are smuggled into Nagaland from Manipur. 15. Chinai (2004), writing on women’s health issues in Nagaland, reports dismal conditions in state-run primary healthcare centres and hospitals, where most basic facilities needed for emergencies are non-existent. Drawing from Behal’s research on women’s reproductive health, she further writes that reproductive health problems left untreated cause complications leading to high infant and mother mortality rates. Nagaland State Human Development Report (2004) gives a rosy picture and so does the survey by National Rural Health Scheme, but the data is not considered reliable as many deaths in remote areas are not reported. See also the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and Macro International (2009) report, National Family Health Survey, India 2005–6, on the family health survey undertaken in 2004–5 in Nagaland. 16. Hunting of wild animals, such as bear, deer, flying fox and monkeys, is common in Nagaland. Several times I have seen hunters bringing back these wild animals. 17. Chürhu wanted to show me the tiger fat that he stored in a bamboo container, but was unable to locate it as he had not been using it in recent years. 18. During my visit to Nagaland in 2008, I attended the Kohima village wrestling championship that was being held in the local football ground in Kohima town. Each wrestler had his own masseur/healer present at the event to help with any injuries sustained during the course of the championship. 19. Interestingly, while Khriezolie called his mother a herbalist, in Khonoma village people told me that she was a themu-mia. 20. For comparative literature on Korean traditional healers and shamans who utilize the options offered by the presence of pluralistic medicine, see Kendall 1988. 21. In his fury he expelled his wife from the house. However, after a year he requested his wife to come back as he found running the household difficult.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Chapter 5

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN EVANGELIZATION IN THE NAGA HILLS

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Not coincidentally, these same world religions sometimes accompany political agents with their own designs on local lives and resources. Whether government policies explicitly support missionizing … or provide no such direct assistance … the impact of foreign expansion may severely challenge indigenous social structures and the religious identities they sustain. R.W. Hefner, Conversion to Christianity (1993: 24)

In order to trace and understand the conversion to the Christian faith among the Angami, and the challenges it posed to indigenous sociocultural and religious identities, we need to return to the three major historical events that have affected the Angami since the mid-nineteenth century. These are the annexation of the area by the British, the coming of the American Baptist missionaries, and the Battle of Kohima during the Second World War. They together constitute a historical nexus of developments which were sometimes conflicting and sometimes mutually reinforcing, but always benchmarks used for making contrasts between precolonial, colonial and postcolonial experiences. They have significantly shaped life among present-day Naga, as well as other groups. The rapid increase in Christian denominations, the role of healers in the underground independence movements, and the more recent attempts at conflict resolution by the church, are all very much part of each other. The introduction of Christianity to the Naga Hills provides a backdrop against which to analyse the contemporary trends in Christianity among the Angami in the following chapters. Conversion to a new religion clearly does not occur as an isolated phenomenon, for it brings in its wake a number of other social and cultural changes, as we shall see. The tour reports of the British officers and the letters of the missionaries to the Baptist Home Board provide valuable insights into initial culture contact with the Naga, and allow us to compare different time periods. In this chapter I shall, first, briefly discuss the interaction between the British officers interested in tea cultivation and the first missionary to make contact with the Naga. This will be followed by a detailed discussion of why and how the American Baptist Mission gained entry into the region and the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

160 A Matter of Belief

factors that aided the process of proselytization. I will analyse the role of educational and medical efforts by the missionaries, and how these became important factors in evangelistic activity and persuasion. Finally I will discuss the interaction between Christian and non-Christian Naga as captured in the writings of that period. This chapter relies heavily on information and quotes culled from the reports and letters written by the American Baptist missionaries to the Home Board in Boston.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

British Interest and the Missionaries As mentioned in chapter 1, in the nineteenth century the British interest in the north-eastern hill regions of Assam was initially that of keeping peace in the territory they had won in a war against the Burmese. Their objective was to contain the raids by the hill tribes on the villages within their administrative boundaries, which had resulted in several punitive expeditions with the loss of the lives of several British officers and soldiers. The high cost of administration that would have been incurred had the mountainous region also been brought under British rule had kept at bay the idea of annexing the hills. Soon after winning the territory, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the British had begun to explore the possibilities of growing tea on a commercial basis in the Hills of Assam adjacent to the Naga Hills area (Elwin 1969; Barpujari 1986; Downs 1971; Puthenpurakal 1984). In 1834 on the suggestion of Bruce, a British officer in charge of the experimental tea plantations in Assam, Captain Jenkins (who was the Governor General’s Agent in the North East Frontier, in Assam) invited American Baptist missionaries of the Burma mission to open schools for the tribal people who had been brought from the state of Bihar to work on the plantations. The new mission station was to be based at Sadiya in Upper Assam. The Burma mission accepted the proposition, foreseeing that Sadiya could form the base from which they could eventually launch evangelical work among the Shan tribe of northern Burma and southern China. The Burmese mission envisaged the Sadiya centre as contributing to the larger plan of proselytizing Central Asia in which Baptist centres from India, Burma and Bangkok would participate (Downs 1971: 17–18). However, it is said that the missionaries miscalculated the distance from Sadiya overland to the Shan area and the population of the Shan tribe. They also had misconceptions about the Shan people, thinking that they were a single group, speaking a single language (ibid.). These inaccuracies were later to result in the abandonment of the original plan of the Shan mission. Some of the British officers had also been interested in employing the Naga from nearby villages as labourers in the tea gardens. In fact one of the first missionaries to venture into a Naga village1 was Reverend Bronson, who had decided to work among the Naga and thus went into the area on an exploratory mission in 1839 (Barpujari 1986: 231). The correspondence, in the 1840s,

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 161

between Bronson and Jenkins is notable for the suggestions made by them for recruiting Naga villagers for tea cultivation (ibid.: 252–65). At that time Jenkins not only showed interest in Bronson’s proposal, but with that in mind he even wrote to the Secretary to the Government of India, elaborating his plan to subdue the people and to make use of the natural resources that might be available in the hills:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

I conceive that by a proper co-operation with that gentleman and the encouragement of the Nagas to cultivate the products of their hills and the tea in particular, we may hope ere long to see civilization greatly advanced among these Nagas, and our supremacy gradually extended over the hills, without which, and the consequent suppression of the constant feuds amongst the tribes, there seem to be little hope of effecting any great change in the habits of the people, or of our being able to avail ourselves of the great natural resources of the fine tract of mountainous country. (Jenkins n.d., cited in Barpujari 1986: 256)

The Naga villagers rejected the idea of tea cultivation, for which they would have had to travel a distance, leaving their villages behind – unattended and thus open to attack by neighbouring villages. Bronson had been careful not to incite the suspicions of the Naga villagers he had come in touch with about his dealings with the British. The Naga villagers, who had seen the British take over Assam, were suspicious of any British interest for fear of losing their territory. Fearing the worst for his evangelical activities lest any suspicion be aroused, Bronson at one point wrote to Jenkins, ‘one imprudent step, particularly if it gave me the appearance of preparing the way for taking the country … would turn these against me, and renew all my former difficulties’ (Bronson 29 June 1840; cited in Barpujari 1986: 259). Nonetheless, Bronson was to fail both in persuading the Naga villagers to help in tea cultivation and in getting them interested in Christianity and converting them to the new religion – which was the main purpose of Bronson’s presence in the area. The villages along the Assam–Naga Hill border provided an easy target for the Naga headhunting raids. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, these villages had come under the protection of the British, who had started tea plantations in Assam.2 These villages and in particular the new settlements that had grown around the tea plantations were held under the threat of Naga ‘marauders’. In the 1879 report, Hunter had written that the tea plantation managers had constantly received threats from the neighbouring Naga. Writing about one such incident he said: ‘a hundred armed Nagas came down to a plantation of the East India Tea Company between Golaghat and Sibsagar, and threatened the manager, telling him that nothing could prevent their firing his factory and destroying his plantation any night if they chose’ (Hunter 1879: 182).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

162 A Matter of Belief

The First Missionaries To the British, inviting the missionaries to open educational institutions seemed a way of pacifying the hill tribes. However, the British kept a low profile in the Naga Hills and followed a policy of non-interference in the religious matters of the hill communities. Nonetheless, some officers, such as Johnstone (political agent to Manipur), were eager that the hill men receive education of the religious kind too. Echoing this view when recalling his experiences in the Naga Hills, he wrote:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

I strongly urged the advisability of establishing a regular system of education, including religious instruction, under a competent clergyman of the Church of England. I 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. (Johnstone 1896: 43–44; cited in Elwin 1969: 598)

However, he mentioned that the higher authorities had not shown any interest in his proposal for introducing Christianity among the Naga. Reverend Bronson, as mentioned earlier, was the first missionary from the Burma mission at Sadiya to contact one of the Naga groups. However, for various reasons Bronson was unable to succeed in his mission and finally, because of poor health, he withdrew from the region. With feelings of disappointment he wrote to Jenkins about his unsuccessful evangelical mission and his declining hope of the Naga becoming Christians: ‘I regret to say that I feel almost discouraged about the Nagas becoming a reformed-civilised – and Christian people. Certain it is that a mightier than human arm must effect the change’ (Bronson 24 August 1840; cited in Barpujari 1986: 262). After a gap of almost thirty years, another American Baptist missionary, Reverend E.W. Clark, became interested in the Naga Hills. Mary Clark, his wife and fellow missionary, recounted their longing to go over to the hills in her memoirs: As each cold season came around hill men came in for trade and sight seeing … From the broad veranda of the mission bungalow we looked out day after day, on and on beyond the villages, across the rice fields, over the jungles of the plains, upon the mountains towering in silent grandeur against the southern sky … and we told our Assamese Christians how we longed to bear the message to the distant wilds. (Clark 1907: 9)

Clark, dissatisfied with his work in the Assam plains, which had resulted in very few converts among the majority Hindu Assamese, wrote to the Home Board at Boston about his vision to ‘spread the word of the Lord’ to the ‘wild tribes’ of the Naga Hills. However, for him, working among the Naga still formed a part of the original plan for opening the mission station in Assam for

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 163

the evangelization of the Shan tribe. The American Baptist missionaries shifted their attention to the Naga Hills in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the first mission station was opened in 1872 by Clark in the Ao Naga area, which lay outside the British administrative boundaries. Several stories are told about this mission. According to one of them, the Ao Naga, who would come down to Assamese towns for trade, would visit the school run by the Baptist missionaries at Sibsagar. Mary Clark reminisced in her memoirs on how Naga were fascinated by the printing press and the school:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Our press building, with its typesetting, printing, and binding of books, was for them the wonder of wonders. Some of the great men, dressed in their military costumes, came one day to our schoolhouse door and, manifesting much interest in what we were doing, were asked, ‘wouldn’t you like us to come up to your village and teach your children as you see these being taught?’ A chief replied, ‘Yes, and we will send our children to learn’. (Clark 1907: 9)

On one such visit a delegation from an Ao village approached Reverend Clark to invite him to teach reading and writing to Ao children (Clark 1907; Bower 1929). The Ao Naga villages were outside the British administrative boundary, so when Clark sought permission from the deputy commissioner he was discouraged from going into the ‘wild hills’, with a warning that: ‘a man would be a fool to go into the Naga Hills. His head would be off his shoulders the first night. A white man especially! … there can be no permission from the government for you to go, and … it would be my duty to restrain any one trying to cross the line’ (Bowers 1929: 200). The reasons for discouraging such individual ventures into any area outside the line of control were the implications of the killing of a white man by any of the hill tribes. Such a killing would have made it necessary to send a punitive expedition. ‘In order to uphold the dignity of the Queen and the honour of her Government, should any white man be killed by any of the hill-tribes it would be necessary to send an expedition to punish them and put the fear of law into them’ (Bowers 1929: 200). Notwithstanding these warnings, Clark sent his Assamese assistant, Godhula, to an Ao Naga village with some of the Naga villagers who he had befriended in the Assam plains. Clark followed after a few months. Escorted by sixty warriors he ‘slipped across the border between dark and daylight, and by the next day was far beyond the authority of any earthly government’ (Bowers 1929: 200; see also Clark 1907: 13). After spending twelve days in the Naga Hills, Clark was convinced that he had ‘found his life’s work’ (Clark 1907: 15). However, settling down outside the British administrative area required a permit from the Viceroy of India. Clark was allowed to enter Naga Hills on ‘his own risk, with no expectation whatever of protection from British arms’ (Clark 1907: 16). This was just around the time Captain Butler had been killed in an ambush at Pangti village in the Lotha Naga area adjacent to the Ao villages.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

164 A Matter of Belief

Nonetheless, on several occasions Clark sought help from the British to check attacks on their new Christian settlement. In their turn, the mission also extended hospitality to the British officers who ventured into the Ao area on punitive expeditions (Clark 1907: 81–83). Camaraderie was established between the two; the mission welcomed the news of the annexation of the Ao area and the establishment of sub-divisional headquarters in Mokokchung. In 1889, writing to the Home Board, Clark reported: On the 4th April was the formal annexation of this Ao tribe. It is now included as an integral portion of English India. For about three years or a little more we have had English political control which is about the same as military control, now the tribe is fully taken over and English laws have full sway. An English officer is to reside in the tribe and this is made a sub-division of the Naga Hills District. As the English do not relinquish territory they have once formally annexed to India we may in the future have full confidence of English protection. (10 April 1889)

The American Baptist Mission was quick to capitalize on the fact that the British had moved their headquarters from Samaguting to Kohima in the centre of the Angami territory.

The Kohima Mission to the Angami Naga

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The American Baptist Mission assigned the Kohima field to Reverend C.D. King. However, this turned out to be an inopportune time as the arrival of King and his wife in 1879 coincided with the Angami uprising against the British in which Damant, the then political officer at Kohima, was killed. King, who was at Samaguting on his way to Kohima, recollected the happenings in his report to the Home Board: A fearful uprising has occurred in the Naga Hills. Thousands of our Angami Nagas, in open and determined hostility, are doing their utmost to extirpate every European and every trace of European supremacy in the Angami Hills … In the tragedy with which the outbreak began, the Political Officer in charge of the Naga Hills District fell a victim, and with him sixty or eighty sepoys … At Samaguting, we are stockaded and living in the midst of warlike surroundings and we have even had a little taste of actual encounter. (25 October 1879: 1)

Informing the Home Board that he and his wife had been asked to leave the area and return to the Assam plains, as the British planned to quell the Angami Naga rebellion, he elaborated: The entire cold season is to [be] chastizing the Nagas. One entire regiment is coming up for this purpose with two pieces of artillery. And we missionaries are obliged to leave. There is no help for it. We are not wanted here. This government bungalow is of course needed by government. (ibid.: 18)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 165

The Angami uprising also put the Kings in a dilemma – on one hand they were aware of their position as missionaries who wanted to win over the Angami, but on the other, they were dependent on the British officers for their protection when the uprising took place. The following passage from King’s report spells out their anxiety regarding work among the Angami: The story of battle with savages, in which two officers and, perhaps, less than a hundred sepoys fell, may make but little impression on most minds. But everything has conspired to make this event come home to Mrs. King and myself, and in a less degree, to all who were interested in the new mission, which we were opening. On the one side are fighting our Nagas – the people to whom we were led by so many manifest tokens of providence, the people for whom we were, and are, hoping to spend and be spent. Here is a tribe of probably about 200,000 souls whom we have already come to regard as peculiarly our own people – the stray sheep for whom we are longing and praying and for whom we had begun labour. But they are savages. (King 27 December 1879: 7–8)

In the light of these events, Angami were to remain distant from the missionaries in the initial years of the Kohima mission. It was only when the missionaries embarked upon educational and medical work that they were able to gain some following in Kohima. To understand the strategy adopted by the mission in Naga Hills, we need to take into account how the importance of education and medicine was realized at the beginning of the mission work in the Naga Hills. Keeping this in mind, in the following text, I first discuss the mission strategy for the Ao Naga and then move on to the mission work among the Angami.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Education and Evangelization The Naga interest in education was perceived by the missionaries as an opportunity to teach the Scriptures through educational work. Primary schools were opened so as to impart basic education, and to make Naga literate enough to read the gospel; Bible classes were an essential feature of these schools. Opening new schools had an additional advantage – it proved to be an easy way for the mission to enter new areas in the Naga Hills. Educational work by missionaries thus served a dual purpose: it relieved the government of the burden of providing education to the Naga, and at the same time it facilitated the preaching of the Gospel. Understandably, the first converts were students of the school. From the letters of the missionaries written to the Home Board, it is evident that from the very beginning education had been envisaged as the main tool to gain access to the Naga. Clark emphasized the need for getting more missionaries for running schools; writing to the Home Board that he viewed the schools as serving the function of training teachers who would double as preachers: ‘We must between us start to take the best pupils of the primary

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

166 A Matter of Belief

schools and give them a little better school education and some training in the Scriptures so as to have teachers and preachers. There are no schools in the tribe except those conducted by the mission (10 April 1889). However, the two new missionaries – Haggard and Perrine, who had joined the Ao Naga mission station (see table 5.1), differed in their opinion on the importance of education. As a consequence, in 1895 the training school had to be closed for two reasons: an opposition to teaching duties by the new missionaries and a general lack of funds. Nevertheless Clark remained convinced that schools were needed to train the Naga, and wrote to the Home Board explaining the reasons for closing down the school, while simultaneously emphasizing the reasons why schools were still needed: These schools were the factories so to speak, from which to get Naga teachers and preachers. But to properly qualify pupils to become head teachers and preachers a sort of Normal school was needed … There were a fine lot of advanced pupils when Perrine and Haggard started the English school. But they got tired of the work, ‘did not come to teach school’, made some blunders that interfered with discipline such as forcing Assamese dress on the children who got jeers and jibes from mates in the village, funds were also short and the Training school was closed. (16 October 1895)

Perrine and Haggard had been responsible for the closure of several schools despite the interest shown by the students in the religious curriculum. Writing about the closure of one such school, Clark said:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Some 4 or 5 of his older boys were beginning to take an interest in religious matters, were taking part in prayer meetings. The reaping time in that village was apparently near when the teacher had been dismissed without cause. Several of the leading men of the village came down to me to plead that their teacher might remain. (ibid.)

Interestingly, the same letter goes on to inform us of the interest of Ao Naga elders in education, and of the fact that they had begun to equate education with conversion to Christianity: They said they were old men and [it was] not easy for them to change their religion but they hoped the young people would become Christians, to this end the village as a whole had for some years been observing the Sabbath and had built and kept in order a teacher’s house & school house without pay. (ibid.)

The missionaries thus held conflicting views regarding what constituted evangelistic work. The difference of opinion on the importance of secular education in the initial years of mission work resulted in the closing down of several schools and, from the point of view of Clark, also of losing the opportunity for effective evangelization. The opening of the American Baptist Mission station among the Ao Naga had taken place at roughly the same time (late nineteenth century) as the British annexation of some Angami and Lotha Naga villages that were closer to the Assam plains. Following the annexation, the British introduced changes in

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 167

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Table 5.1 American Baptist missionaries in Ao and Angami areas (1872–1954) Name

Period of stay

Place

E. W. Clark

1872–1901 1904–1911

Molungyimchen, Molungyimsen Impur (Ao area)

Mary Clark

1878–1893 1895–1901

Molungyimsen Impur

S. Rivenburg

1885–1887 1900–1902 1887–1892, 1894–1898 1902–1905, 1907–1916 1918–1923 1898–1899

Impur & Molungyimsen Kohima (Angami area)

S. A. Perrine

1892–1900, 1903–1905

Molungyimsen, Impur

F. Haggard

1893–1896 1896–1897 1897–1899

Molungyimsen Wokha (Lotha area) Impur

W. E. Witter

1885–1887

Kohima

Loop

1901–1908, 1915–1920

Impur

J. R. Bailey

1910–1917, 1919–1925 1927–1928

Impur

C. D. King

1879 1881–1886/87

Samaguting Kohima

J. E. Tanquist

1913–1918, 1922–1928 1933–1940, 1941–1947

Kohima

G. W. Supplee

1921–1922 1922–1926, 1928–1935 1936–1943, 1946–1949

Impur Kohima

B. I. Anderson

1929 1930–1932, 1951–1954

Impur Kohima

Calcutta

* dates adapted from Puthenpurakal (1984: 240–252)

the village political system.3 The establishment of administrative units that created job opportunities perhaps prompted the Naga interest in literacy. Literacy became an instrument for gaining employment in the British administration. Angami were no exception to this, as by the late nineteenth century, Kohima, in the heart of Angami area, had already become the headquarters of the British in Naga Hills. In the following section I discuss how the imparting of education became an important means for missionaries to establish themselves in Kohima and to gain the support of the British officers.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

168 A Matter of Belief

Education Work among the Angami The first missionary to the Angami area, C.D. King, had recognized the importance of education in evangelical work. In 1881, he wrote to the Home Board that the British Government would not support any direct evangelical work, and that the best they could do under the circumstances was to use educational services as a vehicle for preaching the Gospel. To quote him: I am not putting this schoolwork in the forefront, in point of importance. ‘Preach the Gospel’ is the first of our commissions, and in this the Government can not be an ally. But whoever controls the educational work among these Nagas will have it in his power greatly to help or hinder all direct evangelical work. What a difference it will make, for instance, whether Hindu or Christian teachers are brought into these hills to train the first normal classes! I hope the educational work may be largely entrusted to our mission, as has been the case in the Garo Hills. (King 14 January 1881)

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

This reflects the attitude of the Ao elders who had begun to equate education with Christian conversion. Thus in King’s scheme, stopping teachers belonging to a religion other than Christianity (e.g. Hinduism) from teaching in the schools run by the government would have indirectly helped in evangelization. Another paragraph from the same letter informs us of the opportunities that he could foresee for the mission, as the government had allowed educationalists to run schools for the Naga. In the letter he urges the Home Board to send more missionaries to make full use of this opportunity: Another missionary for the Angami Nagas is urgently required … here the Government has thrown the doors wide open all at once, and is waiting, half impatiently to see us fill the big place it has opened for us. Civilizing agencies of every sort are to be precipitated upon this people. And the share of the work that naturally falls to the missionary is enormous. Here is a people with absolutely no knowledge of books or writing, a people whose language no one but themselves has ever mastered. This people is to be supplied with teachers and preachers, with schools and school books, with hymns and hymn books, with tracts and portions of scripture, and with the living oracle of God made intelligible by the daily life and persistent labours of the missionary himself, and that in opposition to manifold evil influences that come in with every tide of so-called civilization. How important that more than one man, whose health may possibly fail at any time, should be gaining a knowledge of this Angami language. (ibid.)

By the early 1920s, the Home Board’s attitude towards education had changed, as they recognized the need for developing an education policy for the Naga. In a letter to the Supplees, one of the last missionary couples posted at the Kohima mission, Robbins from the Home Board clearly stated that: education, especially of the Christian youth, and the children of Christian parents, is a matter of pressing importance. For it is through Christian education that we can

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 169

expect the Christian community to exert its full force in the life of the people, and such education is necessary that leaders may be provided who shall carry forward the work of evagelisation and the building up of a strong, independent, selfsupporting church. (Robbins 27 December 1922)

Thus having recognized the importance of education he emphasized that:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

this matter of education permeated with the spirit of evangelisation holds a central place in the policy of the Foreign Mission Board. We are convinced that the future development of our work among the Nagas depends in a large measure upon the work that you are going to do along these lines. (ibid.)

The Naga villagers, on their part, were equally eager for literacy. They had begun to see education as helping them to get jobs in the administration. The missionaries were invited by several villages to open primary schools. The missionaries, who had already recognized education as the ‘most effective tool for evangelisation’ (Supplee’s letter 1923), consistently appealed to the Home Board to support their venture. In fact the majority of the letters to the Home Board included appeals for grants to run the schools. Encouraged by the success of primary schools, the missionaries began to aspire to open a high school. But the Home Board was short of funds for educational activities as it was the time of recession in America, which meant a reduction in money available to the Baptist mission (Downs 1971, 1992). The paucity of funds did not however prevent the opening of new schools; Naga villagers helped in the running of the schools by contributing to the salaries of teachers. The correspondence of the missionaries with the Home Board mentions that in addition to the salaries, the villagers provided construction material and free labour for building the schools. In addition, Angami boys who were studying for a higher degree outside Naga Hills taught free of charge at the school when they returned to the village during the college vacation. The educated Angami, who were working either in the government schools or in the administration, also taught voluntarily in the mission schools in their spare time (Supplee 15 January 1940: 3). Opening a high school in the Naga Hills became an issue of prime importance for Supplee; many of his reports and letters from the year 1938 until 1946 reiterate the importance of participating in the running of a high school. An excerpt from one such letter tells us of his concerns at losing out to the secular educational process: The fact is, if we lose out on the High School for the Naga Hills it will be a tremendous blow to our Christian work in the Naga Hills. With the High School in the hands of Government, all education will be secular and Christianity will be relegated to the minor place. We have the whip hand, and it is up to us to keep it. (15 September 1938)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

170 A Matter of Belief

However, the Naga Hills administration was supportive of the involvement of the American Baptist Mission in the running of the school. Supplee mentions that the then deputy commissioner of Naga Hills, Charles Pawsey, had been sympathetic to the mission’s efforts, and was willing to give a grant for the high school, the opening of which was on the agenda of the government. In the following passage from Supplee’s letter we get an indication that Pawsey was inclined to have a mission-run high school in Kohima:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Our Deputy Commissioner is also helping us. He seemed almost ready to demand that all Naga boys read in Kohima Mission High School. He called a meeting of the local representatives of all the tribes, and put this question to them: ‘Where do you want the Naga young men to read in High School – Shillong, in Jorhat, in Kohima?’ They considered the matter, and replied, ‘In Kohima.’ He is helping us get Government recognition and also to get Government support for our school. (Supplee 21 August 1939)

In fact, Pawsey had offered Supplee the job of headmaster of this proposed school. For his part Supplee had tried to negotiate the offer by proposing that he may be allowed to teach Bible and Music as elective subjects in the curriculum. However, upon realizing that such ‘could not be done in a Government school, but it could be done in a Government-aided school’, he had then appealed to the Home Board to allow the mission to take on the opening of a high school in Kohima (Supplee 4 September 1939). But the question as to who would fund the high school remained ambiguous. The correspondence about the high school shows equivocal sentiments: on one hand the mission seemed eager to join hands with the government in running the high school in Kohima, while on the other hand, it seemed to have reservations regarding use of government funds to run the school. In one of his letters on the issue, Supplee asserted that the missionaries needed the schools for evangelistic work because the young Naga were keen on education. He feared that if there was no high school in the hills to cater for this demand, Naga students would end up going to the Assamese towns where they might either come under the influence of other religions or, worse, become atheists: It is a shame that Baptists must carry on their work on [sic] with Government aid. But, here I see young people going away to school. They need help. Our school needs it. Our Hills needs our school. Only three ways are open to our young Hills men, viz., atheism, Hinduism, or Christianity. Our boys come back from Government schools too proud to follow the animism of their forefathers. These in the past have become practical atheists. Hinduism is a low religion, but it has conquered other animistic peoples, and who can say that it won’t take Nagas. Educated men in India defend that miserable faith. Without our Mission High School, the native people will demand a Government High School and perhaps get it after a few years. Then we have lost our hold on the young people. (Supplee 4 September 1939)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 171

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In an earlier letter dated 23 May 1939, Supplee had also mentioned that Pawsey was in favour of funding the mission school, as the government could not afford to open one and pay its teachers a higher salary with pension benefits. Finally it was decided to run the high school jointly between the government and the American Baptist Mission at Kohima.4 By 1942 there were eight hundred students who were divided equally between the lower half of the school that was in the mission compound, and the upper half which was in the government high school. The school employed mostly Naga Christians as teachers. While the government paid the salaries of all the teachers, the Baptist mission paid for Bible teaching and supervision of the Christian hostel, and gave aid to Christian students studying at the high school. Bible was a compulsory subject for Christian students and an elective subject for the nonChristians. According to Supplee’s report, the agreement with the government on Bible teaching was ‘not to compel non-Christians to take Bible … not to teach Bible in Government School buildings … [but] to teach Bible only in out of school hours’ (Supplee 15 October 1942). Despite the initial reluctance of the Home Board and some of the missionaries towards educational work, eventually education came to be seen as one of the most effective ways of teaching the Gospel. The need for expanding the educational work had been a recurrent theme in most of the missionary correspondence with the Home Board. As we saw above, education had begun to be equated with Christianity by the Ao Naga at the first field mission. In fact, the missionaries also related being educated with being Christian and vice versa. Reflecting this attitude is a comment Supplee proudly made to the Home Board. He reported that the deputy commissioner of Naga Hills had commended the help extended by the educated Angami Naga during the Battle of Kohima in the Second World War, saying that ‘by educated ones’, the deputy commissioner ‘really means the Christians’ (Supplee 7 September 1944).

Language of Instruction and Translation Education also meant that a language of instruction had to be selected. A debate had earlier ensued among missionaries of various denominations who had been working in Assam as to whether Bengali should be used as the language of instruction, as Christian teaching material was already available in that language.5 Clark voiced the dilemma of choosing the language of instruction for the advanced students: Another thing it would be well to decide before the Normal school is reopened is shall a foreign language be introduced for the advanced pupils that they may have access to general literature. For this the Bengali is used among the Garos who have a population I think of about 150,000, 5 times as much as that of the Ao tribe, yet it has been thought best to require the Garos to look to the Bengali mostly for a literature rather than put the missionary Union to the expense of making an

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

172 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

extensive literature in Garo. And similarly the Assamese, much more numerous than the Garos, have been obliged to look to the Bengali or English. I think it may be assumed that most, if not all, of the Naga tribes will have to go to some other language than their own to get access to much literature. (Clark 16 October 1895)

For the Naga Hills and the adjoining area of Lushai Hills (now Mizoram) and Manipur it was decided to write the primers and Gospel in the native dialect using the roman script. The problem of ‘which script to use’ for these translations had already been solved by Trevalyn, a British officer, who had suggested way back in 1834 that the roman alphabet be used for Naga translation rather than the Bengali or Assamese (Puthenpurakal 1984: 81). With the translations, the Naga languages acquired a script and in the process became written languages. The first school books were written in Ao Naga by Clark. These were, to put it in Clark’s words, ‘a spelling Primer, … a reader …, Life of Joseph, Gospels of Matthew and John, a Catechism and a … Hymn Book’ for the primary schools (Clark 16 October 1895). Alongside preaching and teaching, the missionaries were also learning the local language to facilitate translation of the Scriptures. At the Kohima mission field station, Rivenburg began to translate the Gospels, taking on the help of educated Angami to choose the right Angami word for various biblical terms. Translating into the native language was not an easy process as the missionaries were to discover; it was difficult to find equivalent words for the biblical concepts. By 1910 Rivenburg’s efforts saw the printing of the Angami Catechism and the Gospel of Mark, and the translation of the Gospel of Luke. These were used for teaching in both the privately run mission schools and the government schools. The educated Angami helped in the translation work and, independently, they wrote handbooks for church use. In praise of one such work by a local evangelist, Rivenburg wrote that ‘Evangelist Sierliezhü prepared a “Pastor’s Hand Book” … this little book of few pages will be very useful in the conduct of meetings, marriages and funerals “decently and in order”’ (Rivenburg letter 1910). The translation of the Scriptures into a language which did not have a prior script was not a straightforward task; it required a systematic method in order to devise a standard way to spell words of the tonal Angami language. Tanquist, who came into the Kohima mission centre after Rivenburg, undertook the translation of the New Testament with the help of Lhoulienyü, an Angami Naga and the headmaster of the government middle school, who was also well versed in English and Assamese. The letters by Supplee, written to the Home Board in the late 1930s and 1940s (some in confidence), reflect the dissatisfaction with Tanquist’s method of working among the missionaries at Kohima. Supplee brought the Home Board’s attention to the incorrect methods of translation that were adopted by Tanquist, who had not learnt Angami properly and could not work without a translator. Supplee also added that although Tanquist was credited with the translation of the New Testament, in

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 173

reality all he had done was to edit the translations made by a group of educated Angami. As the individual translators had used different spellings and Tanquist had not standardized these spellings as the editor, the printed texts were full of inconsistencies. The following excerpt from Supplee’s letter gives an idea of the arbitrary nature of these translations:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

When Joe (Tanquist) made his changes, the people decided that each one would spell in his own way. Some to this day hold to Dr Rivenburg’s spelling … Others made other changes, and our literature has not done much to help the situation. As a matter of fact, the new spellings adopted by Joe have gross inconsistencies, and though some of the native folks approached Joe about it, he merely adopted the attitude that what he had written, he had written, and that was the system. Similar sounds in different words received different spellings, and it was arbitrary in the extreme. When I first reached Kohima, Joe’s teacher and translator told me many of the mistakes, but he said that Mr. Tanquist refused to listen. (Supplee 18 March 1940)

Supplee, in an exasperated effort to stop the Home Board from sending Tanquist to the Kohima field (after his furlough in the United States) for further translation work, cited further examples to illustrate these inconsistencies. He reported that in an attempt to reach some standardization in spelling Angami words, a committee was set up consisting of the mission employees, and a report was prepared that was duly sent to the deputy commissioner for official approval. Government had approved the spelling rules, which were to be followed by everyone.6 However, Tanquist, who had suggested the formation of the committee, was the one who kept refusing to follow the rules proposed by it (Supplee 18 March 1940). Learning a native language and translating Scriptures became a qualification for missionary work among the Naga. Narola, daughter of Rivenburg, learnt Angami and translated the Gospel of Mark from Greek for her first exam in Angami Naga. In a letter to her aunt she mentions how she found it hard ‘to find equivalent words for ideas not found in a given culture or civilization’; and added that ‘they have no word that gives the same concept as Jehovah, nor do they have the equivalent for our word “sin”’ (1910; Rivenburg 1941: 117). In fact the translations and use of certain Angami terms have been subject to debate in recent years by young theology students (see chapter 2). The translation work suffered a setback in 1944, during the Second World War Battle of Kohima. The Kohima mission station had to be evacuated. The bombing of Kohima township and village destroyed the houses in the village as well as damaging the mission centre (Supplee 7 September 1944). On his return to Kohima from the United States after the war, Supplee informed the Home Board that in the bombing and ensuing fire ‘every scrap of Angami literature was destroyed’ (4 December 1946).7 In the educational report of the Kohima mission in 1947, Supplee observed that the Second World War experience had increased the desire for education among the Naga: ‘A new era has come to our Hills since the war. Our Naga

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

174 A Matter of Belief

people have a much greater desire for education, and private Middle English and Upper Primary Schools are springing up’ (4 December 1946). Nowadays a vast amount of Christian literature is available in Angami, including the whole Bible and several hymn books and psalm books.8 Besides education, the other most effective way of gaining acceptance in the Naga Hills was through the medical service provided by the missionaries. In fact Baptist missionaries combined medical work with evangelism in their effort to gain the confidence of the Naga.

Evangelism through Medical Work

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The accounts of various places … indicate the prominence of mission medicine in bringing hospitals, services and clinics to a number of areas. Evangelism was mixed up with hygiene, prayer mixed up with treatment … For the peoples of such areas Western medicine was closely tied up with Christianity. (Frankel and Lewis 1989: 10)

Missionaries have often combined evangelism with medical care, seen by them as work of compassion. Many examples can be assembled from around the world (see Beidelman 1982; Frankel and Lewis 1989; Huber 1988; and Ranger 1981). The diseases that were prevalent in the Naga Hill area in the nineteenth century included cholera, malaria, kalaazar, smallpox, dysentery, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and leprosy. The medical work of the missionaries was rudimentary, as very few medicines were available at that time; Western medicine had not progressed beyond painkillers and drugs for fever. Interestingly, the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century was also the period when work on experimental smallpox vaccination was being carried out, and also research on malaria by Dr Ronald Ross in Calcutta (Clark 1907; Rivenburg 1941).9 From the writings of the missionaries it is evident that they seem to have made the most of what was available. Mary Clark’s memoirs of the initial years of mission work mention outbreaks of smallpox in Ao Naga villages and the fear in which Naga held this disease. She mentions that villagers from a non-Christian village came to their Christian settlement seeking help to contain the epidemic and how the help given to them opened the doors for evangelistic activity: There came messengers from brave and warlike Sungdia, unable to combat with smallpox which had broken out there and in neighbouring villages. The Nagas have great dread of this disease, and when it rages badly their only remedy is temporarily to abandon the village and scatter, two or three families living together here and there in the jungle until the epidemic is stayed. These Sungdia men asked that Godhula might go and do for them what had so successfully been accomplished in Merangkong village under like circumstances. We happened to have a good quantity of fresh lymph, recently furnished us by an English civil surgeon. The circumstances were made known to Godhula and the decision left entirely with him. To reach Sungdia village was a three days’ journey through a war country; he would also be at the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 175

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

mercy of warriors during his entire absence. But, appreciating this opportunity of making known the message of eternal life, Godhula quickly replied, ‘Sahib give me the lymph and I will go.’ The disease was controlled in a great measure, the village became our friends, and the gospel was preached to the people. (Clark 1907: 76–77)

Elsewhere she mentions how, in the beginning of their stay among the Ao Naga, the non-Christians from the village had planned ambushing for human heads to intimidate the missionary. However, they returned from the plains ‘without booty, but racked with fever, thus affording the missionary an opportunity of exercising some medical skill and taming their savagery’ (Clark 1907: 18). Such incidents encouraged Clark to request the American Baptist Association for an extra supply of medicines for common ailments like fever, stomach and body aches. Acknowledging the importance of medicine in the spreading of the Gospel, in 1881 Clark wrote to the secretary of the Missionary Union suggesting that knowledge of basic medicine10 should be included as one of the qualifications a future missionary to the Naga Hills should have. He suggested that a theology student planning to join the mission could ‘take some medical lectures’, and furthermore that if the person did not have enough time to combine his theology course with that on basic medicine, he should ‘substitute medical lectures for some of the less important to him of the theology lectures’ (Clark 1881, cited in Puthenpurakal 1984: 83–84). In one of his letters of 1878, Clark acknowledged that the medical work was aiding in mission work; he believed that a missionary would be of more service to the people if he had a knowledge of medicine equivalent to that of a ‘hospital nurse’. But he was not in favour of directing funds to prepare qualified doctors as missionaries, as for him the main aim was the ‘preaching of the Gospel and not the doctoring of the body’. He was cautious that the Naga should not suppose that they were there to give them medicine rather than preach them the Gospel. In his opinion ‘what healing Jesus did was instantaneously. No expense for medicine or instruments, no time lost in diagnosing and studying cases, no time lost in nursing. His healing did not interfere with his preaching’ (cited in Puthenpurakal 1984: 84). In fact, in later years Clark did support the appointment of medical missionaries. An observation made by Mary Clark in the initial years succinctly sums up the role of medicine as they saw it, ‘Some knowledge of medicine also is of great advantage; it is an open door into many homes, and puts an end to consulting soothsayers and sacrificing to demons’ (Clark 1907: 68). Other missionaries to the Ao Naga, notably Sidney Rivenburg and his wife Hattie, often mention the medical work done by them in their correspondence with their family and the Home Board. In one such letter, writing about the medicine of the Naga villagers in Molung, Rivenburg commented: Being alone in this heathen village our time has not all been spent in learning Naga roots and stems. Before the missionaries came the Nagas knew no medicine for their

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

176 A Matter of Belief

ills save the hair of flying squirrels and similar powerful potions, but now they know the value of medicine many think they cannot do without it. In some cases we go to their houses but when practicable they come to the house or send. How many have been helped in this way, it is impossible to say. I remember one afternoon 12 such persons came for medicine. (Rivenburg 8 January 1886)

In some of the letters and memoirs, the missionary mentions that Naga sacrificed animals for the sick and followed the custom of abandoning the belongings of those who were considered to have died a ‘bad death’.11 Writing about their Christian mailman12 who had been attacked by a tiger, Hattie mentions his desire to sacrifice animals to appease the spirits when his wounds did not heal: One of the worst experiences we have had occurred soon after we came, when our mailman was attacked by what he called a tiger … Sidney and I stitched up the mailman’s wounds, which were deep and many … we had no idea he could recover, but he did. Maggots got into his wounds and we supposed they would finish what the tiger had left. He was discouraged, and wanted to sacrifice. Sydney told him that if he did, he would not continue dressing his wounds. (September 1885; Rivenburg 1941: 49–50)

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

New diseases were also introduced to Naga Hills as a result of British expeditions. These diseases sometimes took epidemic proportions that made the new converts revert to their old methods of dealing with illness. Resorting to animal sacrifices to appease the spirits by the Christian converts was met severely – with expulsion from the church. Hattie’s letter gives us an idea of one such incident: As is often the case with military campaigns, the soldiers brought in their wake a kind of dysentery that swept through these villages like wild fire. I do not know how many people have died with it … The people were sure that this pestilence had come from something that they had done which angered the evil spirits. Hence, the only way they could save themselves and their loved ones was to sacrifice. Several of our church members had to be excluded after sacrificing. We have exhausted our medicine. (April 1886; Rivenburg 1941: 61)

In the same letter she pondered on their own limitations because they did not know much about illnesses and the medicine they should prescribe: I had been visiting the sick three or four times a day, at ten in the evening and at daylight. Sometimes I took with me medicine, sometimes broth and nourishment, or both … Sidney and I would give a good deal if we knew more about these diseases. Sidney went to the village yesterday to see a woman suffering intensely from an ailment that seemed to start in her foot. He had no idea whether it was a snake-bite or rheumatism. He gave her a dose of castor oil and some liniment. (April 1886; Rivenburg 1941: 62)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 177

Once medical work was recognized to have a bearing on the evangelical work, medical missionaries were sent to the Naga Hills to open a dispensary. In 1905, Loops, a medical missionary, joined the Impur station. After five years, another medical missionary by the name of R. Bailey replaced him. The strategy they both adopted in giving medical treatment greatly facilitated the missionary work; they made it a custom to read a passage from the Scriptures every time a patient came in for treatment (Rivenburg 1941: 114). Smith, in his monograph on Ao Naga, mentioned the impact of the medical services provided by the missionaries on the popularity of traditional healers in the following passage: Hospitals, dispensaries and an itinerant surgeon are breaking down superstition and are reducing the influence of the medicine man and magician. Before the missionary began his work in the hills they relied quite largely upon magical practices for the treatment of ills, but very soon they began to realize the value of medical treatment … They began to appeal to the missionaries to such an extent that the magicians saw their influence was being undermined and grew restive. (Smith 1925: 189)

Missionaries also engaged the Ao Naga Christian converts in medical work by training them in basic healthcare work. Smith wrote about how an Ao convert, who had taken a medical course, had become popular among the villagers for his work, affecting the popularity not only of the traditional healers, but also of the medical missionaries due to closer interaction with the villagers. To quote Smith:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Nagas, especially the Christians, took great pride in the work done by this man, and when he began his practice the medical work of the missionary physician was very markedly reduced. This native was able to get into closer touch with the people than [the] missionary, and consequently his influence has been no small matter in making inroads into the province of the magicians. (Smith 1925: 189)

Bailey also corroborated the same in his report to the Baptist Missionary Conference, noting, ‘since Benni has begun to practice independently near Impur my dispensary work has fallen off perceptibly. This causes me to look further and to unoccupied places for my future work’ (Bailey 1913: 52; Smith 1925). Smith mentions that the Naga men working in the dispensary began to display a changed attitude toward disease. However, he does not discuss the nature of the change thus leaving it to our speculation whether these men had ceased to believe in the traditional disease aetiology or had begun to question the efficacy of traditional healing techniques. For some reason, in spite of the success of medical work by the missionaries, after Bailey’s death in 1928 no more doctors were sent to Impur. The mission dispensary was run only by compounders or nurses, although occasionally a government doctor from Mokokchung, the British sub-divisional headquarters in Ao Naga region, visited the dispensary. Only ordinary cases of common

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

178 A Matter of Belief

sickness continued to be treated at the dispensary ‘to keep alive a service that was much appreciated by the people’ (Puthenpurakal 1984: 115). The success of medical work among the Ao prompted the missionaries to include it in their agenda when they opened a mission station among the Angami Naga. The Angami, often described as more resistant to change by both the missionaries and the British, were nevertheless receptive to the medical effort of the missionaries, as we shall see in the following section.

Medical Evangelism among the Angami In the very first letters, written in 1879, by C.D. King to Murdoch at the Home Board, he mentions the concerns of Angami about disease and illness. Apparently the first Angami man he met in Samaguting asked him whether he could cure illness. To quote him:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

They (the people) are already coming to me for medicine. I am reminded of the first time a Naga came to my tent. His first question (through an interpreter) was, ‘can you cure disease?’ and the second, ‘can you tell by looking at a person’s hand, how long will he live?’ … How I long to be able to tell them of the great Physician! I have often thought of the significance of those first questions. In the meantime, I am doing what I can for their bodily ailments. (September 1879; Puthenpurakal 1984: 94)

King remained in the Kohima field for a short time before leaving it owing to the illness of his wife. Sidney Rivenburg replaced him in the late 1880s, and he also reiterated the Angami interest in medicine. Letters written by Rivenburg and his wife Hattie to their relatives, and the reports to the Home Board, speak volumes for the importance of medical work in their evangelistic activities. Some passages from their letters illuminate how they combined medicine with evangelism during the first three years of their stay in Kohima. Rivenburg took it upon himself to administer medicines and speak about the Gospel to the sick and their families, and also do some street preaching: In July I did little besides preaching and doctoring. Nearly the whole month I went into the village morning and afternoon for from 1½ to 4 hours. Many listened to my words with more or less interest and I know I was able to do much good to the sick. How often I have longed for that divine power which in the early days wrought cures by a word. (Rivenburg 2 October 1890) During the three months past we have had fairly good health. My time has been considerably taken up with repairs and the remainder given to street preaching, and to looking after the sick. (Rivenburg 1 April 1891) It has been my daily practice to go into the Naga village and give out medicine to the sick and preach to whomsoever would listen. (Rivenburg 2 July 1891)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 179

In one of the reports to the Home Board, Rivenburg wrote that the Angami Naga at Kohima preferred to come to him for medicine rather than go to the government dispensary, as they had heard about the efficacy of his medicines in Molung mission. In his report Rivenburg stated that he used medicine to gain the attention of the villagers. The following passage elaborates his method of work: I have changed my tactics in one respect. As there is a free dispensary, with a native and European Physician attached, I determined, when I first came here, not to give out medicines; and for three years held to my position. When people came I told them to go to the dispensary where they could get proper treatment. But my fame as a medicine man followed me from Molung and I could see no one believed me when I told them I was not a doctor and they could get better treatment at the dispensary. The Nagas have lost faith in the Gov. doctors and verily believe they give poisons instead of good medicine, and simply return to their houses to suffer when directed to the dispensary. Not one in twenty would go unless I went with them; and at last, I made up my mind it is only common humanity to dose out medicines to the best of my ability. This I am now doing. Many come to the house; but when I go to preach, a Scripture portion, hymn book, pills, quinine, chlorodine and painkiller are my weapons of warfare. (Rivenburg 1 July 1890)

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Acknowledging the need for a medical qualification, Rivenburg and his wife went to America in 1892 where he studied medicine for two years, and returned in 1895 to serve in Kohima as a medical missionary. As a medically qualified person, most of Rivenburg’s time went in treating the sick. He speaks of his routine in one of his letters: My work, aside from repairs, has been solely looking after the sick and preaching. Many have been treated at the house. Every Sunday of the quarter and several days of each week I have spent from one to four hours in the village going about relieving whomsoever I could from my medicine case and telling the story of Jesus to few or many where I found them willing to listen. And they have usually been willing to give me a respectful hearing, but no one has shown any disposition to do more than listen. (1 April 1895)

The attitude of the villagers towards Rivenburg also changed after he returned to Kohima with a medical degree. Hattie’s letter informs us of this: Since our return to Assam, the attitude of the Kohima village folk has completely changed toward us. Before, they were coldly curious. Now they are definitely more friendly and respectful, not only as we pass, but as Sidney and the Christians try to tell them of our religion. We feel that one reason is because Sidney is a full-fledged doctor. He seems to have an uncanny accuracy in diagnosing these oriental diseases. He has had some amazing recoveries among his patients. Now as he goes into those smoky, dirty huts to sit for hours beside some sufferer, seeking to find a remedy that will allay the suffering, and praying for that person’s salvation, his actions speak to them louder than any mere words of the love of god who gave his Son to prove that love. (1901; Rivenburg 1941: 91)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

180 A Matter of Belief

As a qualified practitioner, Rivenburg was also able to operate upon cataracts – an act that won him the confidence of the old people. However, lack of postoperative care posed a problem for his work, as an unsuccessful operation could have reversed the attitude of the people towards the missionaries. Hattie airs these concerns in a letter to her parents written in 1901: Sidney has successfully removed several cataracts. One man, who was blind and now sees, is so grateful that when we were coming over to Impur this last time he insisted on carrying our loads for nothing, telling everyone he met that this was the Sahib who had made him see. This free advertising was rather embarrassing since the operation is a very delicate one and the conditions must be just right to ensure success even in America, where it is easier to secure proper after-care. Sidney has no desire to make wholesale practice of such feats of surgical skill. (Rivenburg 1941: 91–92)

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Incidentally, Rivenburg’s medical services to the Naga were also recognized by the British Government, and he was honoured with Kaiser-I-Hind medal, the civilian honour for good service.13 Not much information is available on the interaction between the missionaries and the traditional healers and diviners. A passage from a letter by Hattie to her parents, written from Kohima, gives us an indication of their attitude when confronted with a spirit medium, who happened to be the wife of a Christian convert: One of our Naga boys is having a terrible time with his vixen of a wife, who is a medium for the spirits. She claims she can determine what the spirits are saying to the Nagas. In return for her gift of prophecy, she charges a good substantial fee to the people who come to consult with her. The other day she was supposed to be sick and out of her mind, so they sent for me. She apparently was unable to talk, had no fever, but, oh, how wickedly she struck her husband, even kicking him! I gave her some quinine and wished I had something more bitter. I doubt whether she calls for more medicine. I asked why she did not call on her spirits to help her, but the natives say the spirits will leave a medium as soon as she or her family becomes ill. I said I thought I would dismiss spirits that were of no value to me when I needed them. (Hattie 1880; Rivenburg 1941: 81)

While the missionaries write of using medicines to win the confidence of Naga people, I have not as yet come across any comments on how the Naga villagers reacted to the illnesses from which the missionaries seem to have suffered so frequently. Most letters of the missionaries to the Home Board mention concerns about their health. It was ill health that had made the first missionaries, the Kings, leave the Kohima field and go back to America. The Rivenburgs also recurrently mentioned health-related problems in their missives. In fact in 1908, Hattie, Rivenburg’s first wife, succumbed to an illness (contracted) in Kohima (Puthenpurakal 1984: 250).14 After this overview of the role of education and medicine in evangelization, the question arises as to what kind of changes were introduced into village life

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 181

and what regulations set the Christians apart from their non-Christian fellow villagers. In the following section we will discuss the new Naga Christian community and the interaction between Christians and non-Christians in the beginning of Christianity in the Naga Hills.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Beginnings of a Naga Christian Community The first Christian village in the Naga Hills was founded in the Ao area by Clark (helped by his wife Mary and assistant Godhula) along with a clutch of followers. The new village, a breakaway from the parent village of Haimong or Molung, came to be known as Molungyimsen, literally the ‘new Molung’ (Clark 1907: 68; Downs 1971: 66). There are differing suggestions as to what led to the founding of a separate hamlet for the Christians. The unwillingness of the Christians to make contributions to communal ceremonies and to follow the restrictions on the village taboo days is said to have created rifts between the Christian and non-Christian villagers. According to Downs (ibid.), besides the non-participation in festivities, the other reason for the expulsion of the converts was their unwillingness to take part in the defence of the village at that time, when there were constant raids on Haimong. Clark, on the other hand, explained that their decision to form a new village was based on the premise that in a new village converts could follow Christian discipline, and ‘the spirit of Christianity rather than of war should reign’ (Downs 1971: 66). The new Christian settlements were established either as a separate khel within the village or a new village was founded. These khel were named ‘Christian or new khel’ in the local dialect. Even today they continue to be known by their old names; for example, Basa-khel (basa means ‘new’) in the village of Keruma was formed in the 1950s by the first converts, who had been expelled from the parent village, and it has continued to be known by the same name. According to my informants, the Angami were more accommodating towards the converts than other Naga groups,15 where the converts in most villages had to move out to form a separate Christian hamlet. Establishment of the mission station and a new religious community also meant that land was needed for building the mission station and chapel, and this land was purchased from the villagers. We have come across some instances in which the land that was sold to the missionaries was considered unsuitable for use by the villagers – a ‘bad’ piece of land; a place that was haunted by evil spirits. For example, in the 1890s, when the American Baptist Mission decided to move the first mission centre from Molung village to another location that was closer to the Ao villages in the interior area, they purchased land situated between two villages, which was locally known as impur. Literally meaning ‘nobody’s land’, impur was considered to be inhabited by spirits and thus considered unsuitable for use by anybody (Downs 1971: 116). The mission

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

182 A Matter of Belief

station was nonetheless established and called Impur. Building a church on such land was perhaps taken by missionaries as setting an example that the new faith was not afraid of the superstitions of the old.

The Relationship with the British Officers

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Venturing into a geographical area that was in the process of being explored and annexed by the British, the American Baptist missionaries had to deal with the administration at every step. Even though the first mission station set up by Clark among the Ao Naga was outside the British territory, he was dependent on the British for protection from hostile Ao villages. From the monographs and tour reports by the British officers who were posted in the Naga Hills and the letters of the missionaries, we get an idea of the kind of relationship they had with each other. As we have already mentioned, educational as well as medical work aided the missionaries in getting permission from the British administration to open new mission centres in interior areas. Some officers supported the work of the Baptist missionaries by providing government grants for the schools and thereby paying the salaries of the teachers. As already mentioned earlier, Deputy Commissioner Pawsey supported the opening of a high school in Kohima for the Naga that was funded by the government, but managed by the American Baptist Mission. But not all the officers were appreciative and supportive of mission work. In certain areas, especially concerning aspects of the native lifestyle, there were conflicts between the administration and mission ideologies. The British officers themselves were divided over the evangelical activities of the mission. Sympathetic ones like Johnstone saw it as a good strategy. To quote him: it can not be doubted that a large population of Christian hill-men between Assam and Burmah would be a valuable prop to the State. Properly taught and judiciously handled, the Angamis would have made a fine manly set of Christians, of a type superior to most Indian native converts and probably devoted to our rule. (Johnstone 1896: 43–44)

Religion of course, was no substitute for political and military methods of exacting obedience from people. Nevertheless, conversion to the faith of the ruler was perceived by some officers as a step towards consolidation of rule. But officers like J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills, who had also written monographs on the Naga, were wary of the changes that were taking place under the influence of Christianity. They were opposed to the sanctions the missionaries had imposed on the Naga converts. What these sanctions were and how they affected the newly formed Christian community, as well as the interaction between Christian converts and non-Christian villagers, will be discussed in the following section.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 183

A Changed Way of Living

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Evangelical activity by the missionaries also brought in its wake a changed way of life for the Naga. As has been noticed in other parts of the world, missionaries expect the converts to follow a lifestyle that is divorced from any animistic suggestions.16 In Naga Hills the attitude of the American Baptist Mission was no different. Some writings about the mission and reports by the missionaries to the Home Board inform us of the sanctions imposed upon the converts to introduce a way of living that would differentiate Christians from the non-Christian villagers. Thus sanctions were imposed against participation in any ritual or communal activity that involved worship of traditional spirits and included feasting and drinking of rice beer. The Naga had reservations about giving up their traditional way of life, but ignoring the cultural ethos of the Naga, the missionaries continued to denounce almost all traditional institutions – youth dormitories, festivals, rituals and feast giving – almost every ritual activity was labelled ‘pagan’ and rejected. The American Baptist missionaries brought with them not just a new faith, but a whole new lifestyle, which they were bent upon propagating among the new converts. Abstinence from drinking the rice beer began to be seen as mark of being ‘Christian’ as opposed to the beer-drinking ‘heathen’ (Downs 1971; Mills 1935). However, as rice beer formed part of the staple food, the converts found it difficult to give it up. In their letters the missionaries mentioned that there was frequent backsliding, and the attitude of the new missionaries who joined the first mission station was strict towards the implementation of these membership criteria. As a result of such strict rules, in 1896 the whole church was disbanded in the Ao Naga village of Molung. Clark’s letter to the Home Board in 1896 explained the events that led to the disbanding: a few Sabbaths previous to the disbandment, I was present when the question of temperance was discussed. No Naga present approved publicly of making total abstinence a basis of church membership. The leaders advised disciplinary sharp [sic] for any show of drunkenness … Soon after this the church members were thoroughly canvassed house by house and I think but one man was willing to accept teetotalism as a basis of church membership, certainly not one in the old organization joined the new. When the question of disbandment was up, the new missionaries strongly urged the necessity of teetotalism in the church. Some members expressed themselves as quite lost [sic] to disband, but did not wish to vote against the strong conviction of the missionaries. Some voted to disband, none against it – technically a unanimous vote. (29 September 1896)

The ban on drinking of rice beer was not supported by all. Some of the educated Christian Naga, in fact, questioned the strict criterion for church membership by quoting instances from the New Testament. Elsewhere in the letter mentioned above, Clark also wrote that during a meeting in the Ao church to discuss the issue of abstinence from drinking rice beer, ‘one of the most influential and

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

184 A Matter of Belief

outspoken men quietly remarked, that wine was apparently used in New Testament times, and total abstinence from its use did not seem to be taught by Christ or made a condition of discipleship’ (29 September 1896). Unlike the other missionaries, Clark was not against moderate use of rice beer, proposing that as even the non-Christian Naga condemned drunkenness, rice beer in moderation should be seen as a staple food.17 In spite of Clark’s understanding that rice beer was staple food for the Nagas, he was hesitant to support its consumption. The following passage from his letter tells us the way he debated the issue and then decided to support abstinence from alcohol as a criterion for church membership:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Here we have something in use that corresponds probably somewhat to wine in New Test[ament] times. How shall we fight the abuse of the thing? Can we improve on the practice of Christ and the Apostles? Total abstinence is doubtless best. But if we insist on this which has not good New Test warrant and deny half, or ¾ or 9/10th of the converts baptism and church memberships then what? Or shall we go on the New Test basis of temperance, discipline for drunkenness and educate the people up to abstinence. I am a little afraid that Christ and the Apostles were right in allowing some reforms to be made by Christian communities, some reforms for an educated Christian conscience to make, some reforms to the effected behind the Cross rather than in front of it: But the experiment of that abstinence is now on and I cheerfully and heartily give it aid. (26 February 1895, original emphasis)

Even though teetotalism was not completely supported by some Naga Christians, a majority of the converts made it an essential criterion for joining the Naga church. In 1890, the Rivenburgs, who were stationed at Impur, showed concern about the strict criterion for membership of the church. Hattie observed that even though there were several villagers who were ready to join the church, the Christians insisted that they prove through their conduct that they were ready to convert. She remarked that the ‘terms of probation made the Baptist church sound like a Methodist church’ (Hattie 1901; Rivenburg 1941: 91). Thus to qualify for baptism it was required that an individual prove that he/ she had been following the rules of abstinence that had been set for the Christians. These were to become a criterion for membership at other mission stations as well. Writing about baptism among the Angami at Kohima station, Narola (Rivenburg’s daughter) mentions: ‘several candidates were examined for baptism. Besides passing quite a stiff examination in their knowledge of Christian beliefs, they are required to furnish evidence that they have not participated in any heathen ritual, nor taken any beer for three months’ (Narola 1910; Rivenburg 1941: 117). Even today the Baptist church (as well as other churches) has continued to support abstinence from drinking alcohol.18 The missionaries, as said earlier, were not only propagating a religion but also a way of living. In addition to the other sanctions on rice beer consumption and participation in traditional rituals, the students in the mission school were encouraged to change their style of clothing: to adopt Assamese-style clothes or wear Western-style shorts and shirts instead of the apron and kilt that was

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 185

traditionally worn.19 Clark’s letter outlines the problems that these pupils faced – becoming the target of their peers’ jokes because of their clothes. To quote him: I did not object to the reform, but the way in which it was done. The bossing as to this, and other matters was pretty high here at Molung for a year. Boys in the Training School required [sic] to don Assamese clothes and thus become a laughing stock in the village – an attempt that proved a potent factor in the breaking up of that school, and in arraying the public spirited men of the village against the new missionaries. (Clark 29 September 1896)

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In the same letter we are also informed that the two new missionaries (Haggard and Perrine) had a certain disregard for the village hierarchical order; they resented the respect shown by Christians to their non-Christian elders who were members of the traditional village council. Clark elaborates that the missionaries ‘were irritated because the leading men were not meekly submissive, and yet continued to occupy a prominent seat in the Chapel, which by the common consent of the people was reserved for them because from of old it has been the custom among the Aos to respect old men, especially those in authority’ (29 September 1896). As mentioned earlier, backsliding by Christian converts who had given up rice beer drinking and participation in traditional ritual practices were frequent occurrences in the first few years of the conversion. From the missionary’s letters and memoirs we come to know of the dilemmas that the converts faced at the time of illnesses in their families. Mary Clark recounts the dilemma Christian men had to face when their non-Christian family members expected them to sacrifice animals to the spirits at the time of illnesses. She also observed that the Ao Naga women perceived the new religion to be only for the men, thus in the beginning they were seen as major hindrances for evangelical activity: There was difficulty in early persuading the women that this new religion was for them as well as for their husbands and sons, and thus they were a decided hindrance to the extension of Christianity in the village. It was with great difficulty that a Christian man with an unconverted wife could prevent sacrifices and offerings for the restoration of the sick. There would come the taunt, ‘Oh.You don’t care if we die. You are not willing to give anything to save us. You have taken Sahib’s religion, and do not care longer for your family’. (Clark 1907: 72)

The sanctions had a direct effect on communal life, and conflicts increased between converts, who refused to participate in village feasts, and nonChristians, who insisted that they should for the welfare of the whole village. In the following section I discuss these changes as observed by the British officers, Hutton and Mills, and the missionary sociologist, W.C. Smith.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

186 A Matter of Belief

Sociocultural Changes Mills (1931) and Smith (1925) both wrote about the sociocultural changes that had begun to occur in Naga village life after a section of villagers had converted to Christianity. Smith noticed that Christian Naga had stopped participating in community events and contributing their share towards the feast. He observed that: Christianity has weakened their taboos and their system of social control. The Christians have refused to pay the assessments for defraying the costs of the religious festivals and for remunerating the village priests. This refusal has led to persecution and appeals to the official. They were released from the contributions, but were compelled ‘to observe the heathen rest-days’. The Christians have refused to take part in the religious ceremonies which are conducted for the benefit of the entire village. Formerly all members of the village had to share in these ceremonies and refrain from all ordinary work, on pain of being fined by the village elders. (Smith 1925: 190)

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Interestingly, Hutton also comments on this trend in a footnote on the same page, saying that ‘they (Christians) are only compelled to observe the eight most important rest-days in the year, and can escape this too by removing their dwellings to a site outside the village fence’. Mills was vehemently critical of the role of the missionaries in changing the traditional way of living of the Naga. In the Census report of 1931, he blamed the Baptist missionaries for interfering in the traditional customs of the Naga,20 contrasting it with the efforts of the government to preserve traditions in the face of outside influence: Government has been at pains to preserve them (customs) to the utmost limit possible and to ensure that such change as must inevitably come shall not be destructive in its suddenness. In strong contrast has been the attitude of the American Baptist Mission. As religion is a part in every Naga ceremony and as that religion is not Christianity, every ceremony must go. (Mills 1935: 148)

Smith’s observations on the Ao Naga tell us more precisely the changes that were occurring in the community life as a result of conversions and of the extension of British administration into Naga Hills: Boys in Christian families are refusing to serve at the young men’s house … contacts of the Nagas with the Government and the Mission have taken away many of the old practices which ministered to their desire … the Christians have been cut off from the various festivals where the dancing, drinking and general hilarity had a cathartic effect. On some of these festive occasions the Christians sit around and watch the performances, which are taboo to them, without having any equivalent for these activities. (Smith 1925: 193)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 187

It is not clear from the missionary papers if any communal Christian feasts replaced the traditional festivals. Perhaps in later years, when the missionaries introduced choral singing and lessons in playing various Western musical instruments21 to the students, some kind of Christian festivities evolved comparable to those undertaken by the non-Christians. Another development that is mentioned in the writings is the violation of certain village rules by the Christians. Smith informs us of the deliberate mischief by the converts to incite the anger of non-Christians: Some of the Christians get excitement by doing things to annoy the non-Christians. In one of the villages the Christians built their meeting-house in the middle of the main thoroughfare, which was a red flag to the non-Christians. It produced so much annoyance that the matter was taken to the Political Officer, and a recommendation was made that the building be removed. (Smith 1925: 193–94)

There were incidents in which the converts even desecrated places that were held sacred by the non-Christians. Mary Clark recounted one such incident in which students from the mission school broke a boulder thought to be inhabited by a spirit. Although she does not tell us whether these students were Christians, nor the reaction of the non-Christians to the incident, it surely must have caused some concern. To quote her:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Going down the hill-side one morning we were surprised to see that a huge boulder, long thought to be the abode of demons, was broken. Formerly no one would go near it; but the boys taught in our day and Sunday schools gradually began to climb over it and sharpen their hatchets on it, and now doubtless, some of these young dissenters had struck the fatal blow – a blow too, full of meaning. (Clark 1907: 107)

Smith indeed commented in his monographs that non-Christian villagers would give up some traditional ways on seeing that no harm came upon the Christian villagers who did. He speculated that a decrease in sacrifices of domestic animals to appease the spirits and in the spending of surplus produce for feast giving would make the Christian villages ‘more prosperous than others’; and this could result in ‘disorganization in the old system’ (Smith 1925: 190). In Hutton’s official tour diaries of 1935, as the district commissioner of Naga Hills, he mentions certain occasions when he had to settle disputes between Christian and non-Christian villagers. In one such dispute he arbitrated on the right to wear a special ceremonial cloth claimed by non-Christians in spite of their not having performed the requisite rituals. The following incident from his tour diary when he was visiting a Sema (Sumi) Naga village gives us the gist of the incident: The question of the patterns of cloths is giving trouble. Certain patterns are worn by householders who have performed certain social ceremonies and by their unmarried sons. When the boy marries he ceases to wear the cloth until he has qualified for it.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

188 A Matter of Belief

The pattern is very popular and Christians have started wearing it without qualification which has scandalized the ancients. Both sides came to me about it. I ruled that Ancient had the right to it, but that provided some recognisable alteration was made in the pattern no exception would be taken to Christians wearing similar ones. I suggested a red cross in the middle of the black ground which was accepted without demur by those present. (Hutton tour diaries 1935: 4)22

While touring in Kohima he came across a similar dispute about the nonabidance of the traditional custom of unmarried girls keeping their hair shaven or closely cropped. Some of the Christian converts apparently had taken to growing their hair. Writing about the dispute and his arbitration he said:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A fuss is going on in the village because one or two Christian girls have refused to shave their heads till marriage according to the immemorial custom of the village. They like to grow their hair to put the come-hither on the boys, but the ancients say it is tabu, and of course the Christians cannot pretend that it is a matter of conscience for them that they must obey the village custom or live outside the village [sic]. It is a clean and seemly custom, and St. Paul would certainly have been on my side. (Hutton tour diaries 1935: 32)

As mentioned in the beginning, conversion to a new religion is not an isolated phenomenon. Thus we see that conversion brought in its wake a number of sociocultural changes. The new converts gradually accepted the sanctions, and some even went ahead to defy certain customs. The historical overview throws light on the various factors that were instrumental in the opening of the Naga Hills to outside forces. Although the Naga, especially those from the villages along the Assam border, had always had trading relations with the plains villages, their dealings with the British during the annexation introduced them to a monetary economy. With the expansion of British administration, new job opportunities also opened up for the Naga. These developments brought home the importance of education, both in getting jobs in the new administration and in gaining an equal footing with jobseekers from outside the Naga Hills. The Naga interest in education also benefited the missionaries, who were able to get permission from the government to enter the interior areas; Naga invited the missionaries to open schools, which were funded by the villagers. Education and Christianity were seen as interrelated; education was equated with conversion to Christianity. Another important factor that helped the American Baptist missionaries was medical work; although rudimentary, it helped the missionaries gain the confidence of the villagers. Realizing the importance of medical work, qualified medical missionaries were sent to the Naga Hills. Thus, education and medical work became the two most important factors that helped in evangelistic activity and initial conversions to Christianity.23 But conversion also affects the sociocultural milieu of a people. The changes in the way of living for Christians due to sanctions imposed by the missionaries

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 189

created rifts, sometimes even leading to the founding of separate villages by the Christians. These early developments between the Christian converts and nonChristians began a process that has continued until today. As part of an ongoing process, there have been negotiations between the non-Christians and Christians in various spheres of ritual and daily life, as discussed in the preceding chapters. The conversion to Christianity was, however, a gradual process. According to the American Baptist Mission and the Census reports, conversion gained momentum in the 1930s. This was perhaps related to the sending of about two thousand Naga to France in 1919 as part of the Labour Corps. Interestingly, we find that an American Baptist missionary, J.R. Bailey, also went to France to give moral support to the Naga.24 There was a second increase in the number of conversions after the Second World War, especially in the years immediately following the independence of India in 1947. Peseyie-Maase (2009: 31) writes that many Naga were only nominal Christians as they had converted under pressure from the community, without a personal commitment to God or an understanding of the gospel. But during the 1950s, church growth increased when indigenous evangelists and leaders took control of the church after the Indian Government expelled all American Baptist missionaries from Naga Hills for alleged sympathy with the Naga nationalist movement for separation from India.25 In the 1960s, the revival was brought to Naga Hills by laity who had been influenced by the Union of Evangelical Students in India. In 1972, revival among youth took place after the Evangelical Angami Youth Camp in the Angami village of Nagarjan – now known as Kuda village – in Dimapur (Peseyie-Maase 2009: 32). Until their expulsion in the 1950s, American Baptists were the only missionaries who worked in the Naga Hills as they had successfully blocked the entry of missions by other denominations, and were perhaps supported by the British policy of avoiding any overlapping of mission fields. But after the independence of India in 1947 and the departure of the last British district commissioner of Naga Hills, in the 1950s Catholic missionaries from other parts of India were allowed entry into the area. However, this was also the time when the Naga movement for secession from India took root and the counterinsurgency operation by the Indian security services began to take shape. The consequent persecution and suppression of the nationalist movement, the development of violently hostile divisions within it, and the resultant trauma suffered by the common people, made people feel they had no alternative but to seek solace in the revivals.26 The formation of new churches and the healing crusades that emerged from these revivals are discussed in the following chapter.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

190 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. The Naga village contacted by Bronson was called Namsang, most probably a Wancho village that is situated in what is now the state of Arunachal Pradesh. Wancho are considered to be related to the Konyaks of Nagaland (see Fürer-Haimendorf 1981). 2. The British finally brought the labour for tea cultivation from the Oraon community of Bihar (Barpujari 1986). 3. See chapter 1 for details of the offices of gaonbura (village-head) and dobashi (interpreter) that were created during the British rule. 4. In the recently discovered archives of Kohima mission newsletters (see below) available at Angami Baptist Church Council, there is an issue in English, dated 15 April 1939, entitled ‘Giving over Mission Schools to Government’, which was distributed free of cost among ‘the English reading Christian leaders in Naga Hills and Manipur’. The publication, by the American Baptist missionaries at Kohima mission, emphasizes the need for support from the educated Christian for this move, as well as outlining the benefits, and giving examples of similar cases from other mission centres in Naga Hills and surrounding areas at that point in time. It underlines the argument by stating, ‘Of course education is in itself favourable to mission work. In purely mission schools there can be singing and religious instruction. Some of us cannot be so certain that that is so useful in persuading pupils to become Christians. We know that many non-Christians object to it as religious propaganda. And such cannot be tolerated in a Government school, which must be neutral on religious matters. But the saying may be true which runs like this: “Christianity is caught, not taught.” Children learn useful things in a Mission school. Children also learn useful things in a Government school. Those who wish to become Christian will seek instruction privately and will read the New Testament by themselves’, adding that, ‘Many Christian teachers find posts in Government schools. If they are humble Christians their life and example will count for more in lives of the pupils than any word of mouth could do’, and at the same time reasoning with readers that, ‘Mission does what it can to get the people interested in education. Then it turns over the educational work to Government. It continues to co-operate with Government and all worthy agencies in seeking to lift the people to a higher educational and cultural level … There is less and less mission money for education. And let us repeat it: Education is eventually a Government responsibility. Whenever Government is ready to take over any of our mission schools we shall be happy to turn them over.’ (Kewhira Dielie 15 April 1939). 5. Bengali had been already used as the medium of instruction for the Garo, a large ethnic group in southern Assam (Downs 1971; Puthenpurakal 1984). 6. The government printed the report containing spelling rules, which were to be followed for all the literature published in the Angami language. In order to have a uniform spelling, Supplee was asked by the deputy commissioner to edit the books that were to be printed by the government. 7. However, Supplee was able to reprint some of the literature by persuading the government to release printing paper that had been under controlled supply during the war. The missionaries also printed a mission newsletter from Kohima, primarily in Angami/Tenyidie but with a few announcements in English. The oldest typed newsletter, Kewhira Dielie (Kohima News), dates from April 1932. The newsletter contained announcements from the mission and from the local colonial government divided into three parts – Ura dze (local news), Kekreimia dze (white/foreigners news) and Thedze puo (story). The newsletter was renamed a number of times: Kohima Mission Leshü (1940–47), changed to Angami Mission Leshü (1968–69) and from 1970 onwards it has been called Angami Mission Delie. Over time, its role has changed from being a source of world news to one of news only about the Angami mission. The typed newsletters were thought to have been lost in the Second World War bombings, but in January 2011, the original typed copies belonging to the late Reverend Kevizelie Sophie dating from 1932 to 1939 were discovered by his descendants in Jakhama village, and were deposited with the Angami Baptist Church Council office. These are the only surviving documents in

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

A Brief History of Christian Evangelization in the Naga Hills 191

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

17.

18.

19.

Nagaland of the Kohima mission newsletters from that period. It is not known if there are any copies in the American Baptist Historical Society Archives in Atlanta. The documents are important historically because they cover the period immediately after the famous letter sent by educated Naga, mostly Angami, regarding the status of Naga people to the Simon Commission in 1929 up to the years leading to the Battle of Kohima in 1944. The Angami Bible in Tenyidie was published in 1970. Since then there have been revisions and a new translation of the Angami Bible. The revised edition of the New Testament was published in 1995, and a new translation of the Old Testament in 2009. One of the missionaries, Sidney Rivenburg, had even worked with Dr Ross. His wife mentioned this in a letter to her parents in 1901: ‘While there (Calcutta) Sidney seized the opportunity of studying with Dr. Ronald Ross, who was testing out the theory that malaria fever is carried by the mosquito. We have some of the most violent forms of malaria in Kohima, so that it is of utmost importance for us to know how to protect ourselves, and how to educate the natives to shield themselves from the carriers of this all too often fatal disease. In time, the government may be able to take measures for the extermination of the mosquitoes in Kohima, even though they cannot destroy those on the rice fields’ (Rivenburg 1941: 92). See also Ross (1902: 86) and Daniels (1898–99: 449). Clark mentioned that he found a basic medicine book called Household Practice of Medicine by W.M. Carpenter very useful in the mission work (Puthenpurakal 1984: 218). See chapters 2 and 3 for a discussion of the concept of bad death. Mailmen were employed to take the mail on foot to Assam and carry back mail from there to the Naga Hills. Pettigrew, who was in charge of the mission in Manipur, was also awarded the Kaiser-I-Hind by the British government in 1918 for his services (Downs 1971: 165). Hattie Rivenburg’s grave is located in the mission compound near the office building of Angami Baptist Church Council in Kohima. Examples from Chakhesang group were frequently mentioned. I have also come across some Chakhesang villages which have khel founded by the first Christian converts. See Hefner 1993: 26–27; Beidelman 1982: 127–52; James and Johnson 1988: 214–18; and Comaroff 1985. To quote Clark: ‘The heathen Nagas and I think the heathen generally condemn drunkenness as the other vices condemned in Scripture … breaking of the first Commandment. Hence whereas among the Garos, in Assam and a large part of India drinking of liquor by natives is largely to get drunk it is not difficult to get conscience [sic] to endorse total abstinence. But here among a people of very low diet, with no tea or coffee or anything the like, no use of milk or its products, rice beer they brew themselves and use for food to stimulate digestion, to strengthen drooping energies and because they like it; in this last is the danger. Europeans say it is very refreshing when much exhausted. It must be admitted that in one form, it is probably nutritious and quickly digested, that is when fermentation has only just begun when it is thick as cream and little more than rice in a half decomposed fluid state, like fluid malt’ (26 February 1895, original emphasis). Incidentally, Nagaland is a ‘dry’ state, meaning that there is prohibition on the sale of alcohol. However, local rice beer for personal consumption can be brewed. The prohibition came into effect in 1989 to counter the problem of drunkenness, on the behest of a women’s group called the Naga Mothers’ Association and supported by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council (also see Linyü 2004: 204–9). Illicit sale of alcohol, of both foreign and local manufacture, however, continues. In 2010, Nagaland state legislative assembly constituted a committee to discuss revocation of prohibition, but this move was publicly criticized by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council, representatives from which were excluded from the committee. Therefore, the review has been postponed. Mary Clark (1907: 54) wrote that ‘the Assamese costume of jacket and body cloth is now being adopted by many who have come under Christian influence, especially the pupils in the school’. See also Wati (2009) for details of school life in the mission-run school in Impur in

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

192 A Matter of Belief

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

26.

the 1930s, and the student’s adopting Western-style clothing as a mark of progressiveness and fashion. However, both Mills and Hutton themselves banned certain traditional Naga methods of killing animals for sacrificial rituals for their alleged cruelty. For comparable literature, see Whiteman (1985). Supplee was very active in teaching music to the Naga, who according to him had a musical ear and penchant for learning new tunes (Supplee letters 1935–44). Samples of such Christian Naga cloths were collected by J.P. Mills for the Naga Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. See also Eaton 1984. J.R. Bailey to Huttington, 27 November 1917. See Downs 1971, Ghosh 1982 and Sema 1986. In recent writings, Naga authors have emphasized the feeling of abandonment and directionlessness that they felt when the American missionaries were asked to leave. However the writings downplay the leadership that existed in the indigenous churches (for example, see Lenyü 2004 and Bendangjungshi 2011). See also Chase-Roy 2000, cited in Downs 2010.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Chapter 6

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITY AND THE HEALING SPIRIT

After a hundred years of evangelization your local churches are abundantly experiencing the ‘immeasurable riches’ of God’s grace. In this region of Northeast India, each group has within it a longstanding tradition of God’s communication with mankind through signs and symbols that have assumed a sacred character. The gospel has come to these areas not in order to dominate but to be at the service of every people. The gospel has come in order to be incarnated in your cultures without doing violence to them. In this process Christian tradition both enriches and is in turn enriched by this contact with so many values that are preserved in the hearts of the peoples of these beautiful hills and plains. You have a profound aspiration for the noblest ideals for human dignity, for respect for your human rights, development and peace. All of you, brothers and sisters, must become heralds of God’s saving presence throughout the hills and plains of Northeast India

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

God Bless you. – Pope John Paul II, 4 February 1986, Assam (cited in George 1990)

Contemporary Christianity in Nagaland is the story of how the long monopoly of the American Baptist Church gave way to new denominations. People converted and switched allegiance from one denomination to another. Differences and similarities between denominations are especially evident when we look comparatively at their liturgies. This denominational diversity helps to explain the recent proliferation of charismatic churches, as among the Angami. At the same time, Christian communal celebrations now take place in Kohima in which it is clear that aspects of traditional practices have become integral to such Christian celebrations.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

194 A Matter of Belief

Christian Denominations among the Angami

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Catholic Mission to Kohima The American Baptist missionary monopoly in the Naga Hills lasted until the 1950s. However, the political events in Naga Hills following the independence of India resulted in the expulsion of foreign missionaries, principally the American Baptists, who were thought to be assisting the Naga in their nationalist secessionist movement. It was around this time in the 1950s that Catholic missionaries were allowed into the Naga Hills by the Indian Government (Puthenpurakal 1984; Syiemlieh 1990; Rao 1994). The then governor of Assam invited the medical sisters to serve at the newly opened Kohima Civil Hospital. The Catholic sisters were not allowed to carry on any pastoral ministry among the Naga except in relation to the small non-Naga Catholic community (Rao 1994; George 1990). However, in 1952 they were permitted to carry on medical work in Kohima village through which they were able to make inroads into the Angami community. Sunday services were held in the hospital chapel, and three Angami men converted to the Catholic faith despite opposition from the Baptists and threats of excommunication from the village (Syiemlieh 1990). As had happened with the American Baptist missionaries, who had received support from some British officers, so in the 1950s, in the post-Independence Naga Hills, the deputy commissioner, who happened to be a Goan Catholic, encouraged the work of the Catholic mission by renewing their contract in 1954 (George 1990). The missionaries were able to visit some villages and wherever they went they buried ‘holy medals’, ‘hoping for the growth of the Catholic faith’.1 However in another part of Naga Hills, a few elders from a Lotha village, Lakhuti, bordering the Assam plains, invited Father Belloni, an Italian Catholic priest from the Golaghat Mission in Assam. The rest of the village opposed this action but the elders managed to build a small hut for a Catholic religious service. The Catholic Church in Nagaland faced stiff opposition in the beginning from the Baptist Church, which is reminiscent of that faced by the first Christian converts. The new members were prevented from conversion. They were expelled from villages, fines were imposed on them and church buildings were destroyed. As a result of this, it is claimed that the Catholics were unable to acquire land for building a church for several years (George 1990; Puthenpurakal 1994: 127; Syiemlieh 1990: 44). But opposition is still faced occasionally in some Naga villages. After several years of opposition, in 2005 the Catholics members were finally able to build a small church inside the Nagaland police training camp in Chumukedima. In July 2010 in Anatongre village, Kiphire district, close to the Indo-Burmese border, the newly built Catholic church building was destroyed by the Baptist villagers. The Catholic community was fined Rs 50,000 by the village council for creating divisions in the village, an action in fact opposed by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council itself.2 A well-known case of conversion from Baptist Christianity to Catholicism

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 195

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

is John Bosco Jasokie of Thevoma-khel of Khonoma village. Jasokie is said to have changed allegiance after breaking away from the Naga National Council in the 1950s due to a difference of opinion with its leader Zapu Phizo. Phizo was a Baptist from Merhema-khel. As a result, the village became divided between Baptists, Catholics and Krüna, with Baptists supporting the independence movement, and Catholics autonomy within India.3 In the mid-1960s, the Catholic mission did open their first school in Kohima, which was gradually followed by more schools that are, even today, considered to be among the best in Nagaland. In addition to the convents and the boarding schools such as the Don Bosco at Kohima, a Loyola school and a St Joseph’s college run by the Jesuit missionaries were also founded near Jakhama. By the end of 1969, the Catholics had been able to establish small Catholic communities in the villages around Kohima.4 From 1973 the Kohima– Imphal diocese was formed for Nagaland and the neighbouring state of Manipur, and a decade later, with the expansion of the Catholic Church in both states, they became separate dioceses. There are over fifty-six thousand Catholics in Nagaland in forty-two parishes. Out of eighty-four Diocesan priests, nineteen are from Nagaland itself. Father Carolus Neisalhou Kuotsü was the first Angami to be ordained. There are three Diocesan associations: the

Figure 6.1 Kohima Cathedral at Aradura hill is a fusion of Naga architectural styles. Naga cultural symbols are also painted on the monolith outside, and inside at the altar. The cathedral doors are styled on the Angami kharu with the image of a warrior replaced by one of Jesus. Dedicated to patroness ‘Mary help of Christians’, it was consecrated in 1991 when, for the first time, representatives of the British and Japanese Second World War veterans of the Battle of Kohima were brought together at a peace ceremony in Kohima through a symbolic laying of spears, 2008.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

196 A Matter of Belief

Catholic Association of Nagaland, the Nagaland Catholic Women Association and the Nagaland Catholic Youth Association. In 1991, Kohima Cathedral, dedicated to patroness ‘Mary help of Christians’, was opened.5 The Cathedral is built on Aradura hill, a prominent spot during the Battle of Kohima in 1944, where many Japanese and Allied soldiers were killed. The cathedral is infused with symbols that identify with Naga material culture: the design of the building itself is a fusion of Naga architectural style (see figure 6.1).6 The monolith outside the cathedral is decorated with painted spears and mithun horns (symbol of Nagaland state). The wooden door leading to the prayer hall is styled on an Angami village gate (kharu) in which a figure of a warrior with an enemy’s head enclosed in buffalo horns is replaced with one of a priest holding the cross. The altar is decorated with crossed Naga spears, symbolizing peace, and mithun heads painted on either side of the mural that depicts scenes from the life of Jesus. Below the statue of Jesus on the cross is a carved mithun head. In addition, the ordination cloth for the Angami priest is made from the Angami lohra-mhoshü cloth, which is white in colour with eight rectangular black and red weft motifs. The (non-Naga) bishop’s chasuble (i.e. outer liturgical vestment) is made from Naga cloth. I saw the ones that belonged to the former Bishop of Kohima. They were made from the Konyak and Lotha Naga cloths (which in pre-Christian days were worn only by wealthy and brave warriors, but have since become community identifier cloths), with an added embroidered central panel depicting Christian symbols such as fish, a bunch of grapes, a chalice, a dove, corn and a bread basket.7 Interestingly, among the Naga, the first Catholic communities – those among the Angami and the neighbouring Lotha Naga – were established independently of each other. These two communities later sent missions to other Naga areas which helped in the establishment of more Catholic communities. The Catholic Church of Nagaland is supported by the main Catholic body of churches in India and has brought the financially better-supported Catholic educational institutions to Nagaland. In Kohima the Catholic Church now also has a youth centre that is situated adjacent to the Don Bosco school. The youth centre provides vocational training as well as functioning as a recreational centre. The centre and the youth activity groups supported by it seem to fill the gap that was left after the traditional mode of socialization was disrupted when the American Baptist missionaries barred the converts from attending traditional youth dormitories. Nowadays, what one comes across is a combination of the old and the new system. The age-sets are still an integral part of the village system (see chapter 1). Both Christian and non-Christian members of the village have affiliations to their respective age-sets and participate in their activities during the festivals. The youth centres add an additional dimension to the group activities which are available to the young people in a village, providing them with opportunities to participate in youth camps and events. Most office holders in the Catholic mission are from outside Nagaland, principally from the southern Indian state of Kerala. The funding of the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 197

Catholic Church and the various institutions run by it also comes from outside Nagaland, and is supplemented by donations from the local members of the church. The Baptist Church, on the other hand, has followed the plans of early American Baptist missions that stressed self-reliance, and hence depend largely on funds raised within Nagaland by the local church community. One of my young Baptist Christian informants (who was also the principal of a village primary school) commented that the lack of funds for education in Baptist churches was responsible for the poor standards in their schools. He said that they could not afford to hire good teachers, and noted the contrast with the Catholics whose access to outside funds enabled them to employ better teachers at higher salaries, and whose educational standards were far higher. On the other hand, he was critical of the Catholics for not being self-reliant, saying that they depended on non-Naga leadership in Nagaland, with most clergy being from other parts of India, especially Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. During the 1950s and 1960s, other Christian denominations made their entry into Naga Hills. These were associated with the Revival movement, which had already gained a foothold in the neighbouring hill communities in the 1920s.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Coming of the Revival Church in the North-East The Revival movement began in north-east India, especially in the neighbouring state of Mizoram, in the early 1900s. It intensified in the 1920s, bringing back the use of drums and dancing during prayer meetings. Writing about this change in the ways of worship, Lalswema mentions that: ‘In each church a good space was left open in front of the pulpit and altar where people came out and danced as singing proceeded … The drum that had been banned on account of its association with the old Lushai life was reintroduced at this revival’ (Lalswema 1964: 53–54; cited from Downs 1992: 97). Commenting on the Revival movement, Downs also states that it became ‘increasingly ecstatic and emotional in the period after the Second World War when the Pentecostal influence became widespread’ (1992: 100).8 In Naga Hills the revival wave picked up momentum after the Second World War, especially during the first half of the 1950s. Another revival wave swept through Nagaland in the 1970s, coinciding with increased fighting between the Naga nationalists and the Indian security forces. Several villages throughout Nagaland came under the offensive. The villages suspected of harbouring the nationalists were burnt, and village grouping was carried out by the Indian security forces.9 Christians from the charismatic movement broke away from the Baptist Church and founded the Nagaland Christian Revival Church.10 Other previously banned traditional ways of worship were reinstated and the ‘revivals became instruments of indigenization’ (Downs 1992: 99). As a consequence, the movement created a rift between revivalists and antirevivalists in many churches, which in some instances led to the division of the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

198 A Matter of Belief

church and the formation of small separatist denominations such as Seventh Day Adventists and the Assembly of God (ibid.: 100). Today in the north-east there are several charismatic revival churches belonging to different denominations, with sometimes more than one in a village. These Pentecostal churches in the north-east of India are affiliated to the Universal Pentecostal Church of the U.K. and the New Testament Church of the United States.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Revival Church among the Angami The Revival movement is said to have arrived in Kohima in the late 1950s. A veterinary doctor by the name of S. Sekhose, who was the first to join the Pentecostal Church, is credited with beginning the movement. It was taken forward by Reverend N. Angami, who became the first president of the Angami Revival group and has been the principal of the Kohima Bible College over the last thirty-four years. In recent years there has been a marked proliferation of churches associated with the Revival movement. Stories abound of the miracles that had taken place when the movement was new. Some of these miracles were likened by my informants to the prophecy on the day of Pentecost as outlined in the Acts 2 of the Bible.11 One of them was the pastor of Angami Revival Church at Dimapur and the other was a government officer, who is a devoted follower of the Revival church and also regularly preaches during the evening services. According to one such account of the miracles, sometime in the 1950s, in the village of Chiechama, people saw two spheres of fire coming down from ‘heaven’, which gradually spread across the sky. These spheres of fire, it is said, were also seen by people in the neighbouring villages in Wokha and Phek districts (see map 1.2) of Nagaland. Some of the people in these villages who witnessed the happenings still remember them very clearly. In another incident that took place in the village of Menguzoma, two girls, who had become Revival Christians after experiencing the touch of the Holy Spirit, prophesied that miracles would occur during which food would fall from heaven. It is said that a few days after the prophesy the villagers heard a loud noise, which to some sounded ‘like that of a helicopter’, but none could see anything in the sky. Only the girls could see the food – rice, meat and eggs that were ‘bigger then hen’s’ – dropping from the sky. Nevertheless, the villagers ran to the spot with carrying-baskets to collect the food. The paddy that fell with the rice was cultivated by the villagers and has continued to be cultivated to this day. As a consequence of the prophecy, a number of villagers in Menguzoma converted to Christianity and founded the Revival Church. Where there were no Christians except for the two girls, today the majority of the villagers in Menguzoma are Revivalists. The other accounts that have reached mythic proportions relate to the torture by the Indian Army of the people that were travelling from one village

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 199

to another spreading the word of the Revival crusade, and also to their persecution by fellow Naga. During the 1950s and 1960s, due to the insurgency movement, there was a heavy deployment of the Indian armed forces in the Naga Hills area. There were restrictions on people’s movements from one village to another along the forest paths. However, in their zeal to spread the word of the Revival movement, the revivalists defied these restrictions. They were thus apprehended by the army on suspicion of being insurgents disguised as revivalists, and were beaten up. Throughout these incidents the people kept on chanting ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Hallelujah’. This whole episode was said to have been witnessed by a pair of birds that then flew over to the near by villages and narrated the incident to the villagers. In another incident, an encounter took place between the security forces and the Naga insurgents during a Revival church service, in which members of the underground outfit were part of the congregation. Miraculously, even though there was a heavy exchange of gunfire between the two parties, the bullets did not harm a single member of the congregation. There are also stories about the persecution of the revivalists by fellow Naga. Although the Revival movement itself came in the 1950s, a legend says that in the late 1940s, a member of the Kevichusa clan of Khonoma had the first revival experience. It is said he would pray audibly and continuously. He would even pray inside the thick forest near Baiyavu hill, sometimes spending the whole night there. This was considered a miraculous feat, as the forest was supposed to be crawling with tigers and was a place where no one would dare to venture alone. It is said that the tigers never attacked him. My informant added that unfortunately nobody in Khonoma recognized the sign of ‘calling’, and the villagers declared him to be mad, or kemelo. In Chiechama village, the movement met with much opposition from the existing Baptist church. According to one account, on one occasion when the people were praying inside the Revival church that was housed in a temporary thatch-roofed structure, the pastor of the Baptist church incited the Baptists to burn down the Revival church. Miraculously, while the whole building was burnt to ashes, it seems nothing happened to the people who were inside the church. The occurrence of these incidents is cited by some as a factor that led to conversion and also to movement from one church to another. One of my informants, the pastor of the Angami Revival church in Dimapur, claimed that the denial of the above-mentioned miracles by the Baptist church prompted people to shift their affiliation to the Revival church. Today, although the Baptists and the Catholics are the two dominant denominations in Kohima (as well as in Nagaland), there exist several Revival churches that were founded by former Baptist and Catholic members, and are variously called Revival, Pentecostal, Assembly of God, Seventh Day Adventists, and so on. These churches stress the spiritual/healing aspects of Christianity. This aspect of Revival worship was given most emphasis by my informants in response to my query about their reasons for moving from their original church

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

200 A Matter of Belief

to the charismatic one. An informant from Chiechama village, who I met at a Pentecostal gathering in Kohima, said that his grandfather was the first man in his village to convert to Christianity. His whole family had belonged to the Baptist church, but in the late 1970s his mother had shifted allegiance to the Pentecostal church and gradually the rest of the family members followed suit and left the Baptist church. As a consequence Chiechama village now has two churches – Baptist and Revival.12 Going further into the explanations given for converting and moving from one church to another shows us how internally diverse and complex Christianity among the Angami has become.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Some Stories of Conversion We were on our way back from interviewing a traditional healer in the Semomakhel of Khonoma village when, to take shelter from the rain, my friend and I stopped at Zhao’s (now deceased) house. Zhao was about sixty years old. Besides being a farmer, he was one of the few professional spear makers among the Angami. He was a Baptist Christian and had been a deacon for four years at the Khonoma Baptist church when I met him in 1995. At any given time the church has five deacons from different khel, each being selected for a five-year tenure. We had been talking about various things while having tea provided by Zhao’s wife, when he asked us where we had been before coming to his house. I told him that we had been to Dolhuovi, the themu-mia’s house. On the mention of the term themu-mia, he started telling us his reasons for converting to Christianity. When he was about thirty years old, he fell very ill. He consulted a themu-mia by the name of Khriehede from the nearby Jotsoma village. Khriehede told him that a spirit had abducted his ruopfü, or soul, and this had caused the illness. On the advice of the themu-mia he offered a cock to the spirits in exchange for his soul. After his recovery from the illness, Zhao said that he ‘came to know that we all have a soul that can be taken away’. Around that time, he added, he had also been hearing people talk in the village about a god – Ukepenuopfü. According to him it was this illness episode which made him ponder about this god ‘who is called Ukepenuopfü or Jesus and who helps people’. It was then that he decided to become a Christian so that bad spirits might not abduct his soul again. He converted to Christianity in the 1980s and joined the dominant Baptist church. Some cases of conversion also arose from the inability of a person to attend all the traditional ritual performances in a calendrical cycle because of jobs that kept them away from the village. Irregularity in the performance of such rituals is akin to violating their proper conduct and can provoke the wrath of the spirits (see also chapter 3). During the British administration when jobs became available to the Naga, a number of men moved out from their villages to work

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 201

in the administrative services and converted for this reason. Another factor which is cited by Angami that had a direct bearing on conversion to Christianity among the Angami was the anti-insurgency operations in the 1950s and 1960s by the Indian security forces during which ‘village grouping’ was undertaken.13 Members of different villages were forced to move out of their respective villages and camp together; villages suspected of harbouring or helping the insurgents were burnt, destroying the granaries and the standing crops. The villagers who fled were compelled to hide in the forests and survive on forest produce.14 Their near starvation condition resulted in their breaking traditional food taboos (kenyü) by consuming flesh of python and monkey (whose meat is taboo for Krüna women). The act was akin to natsei – breaches of ritual and thus liable to divine punishment. Having consumed the tabooed meat the only way out for most was to convert to Christianity. My informants, some of whom were very young during this period of ‘Indo-Naga’ war (as it is called by the Naga), remember this period with anguish. One of my informants recollected the dilemma faced by his female family members when all that their father could hunt was a monkey. A kind of generational reversal has been evident in recent times, as when, within a family, first the children take up Christianity and then talk their parents into joining the new religion. An informant from Kidima village, who had converted to Catholicism and had later convinced her parents to convert also, explained that she had wanted to be like some of her peers who were Christian. She considered conversion when she came out of the village to study at the Science College in Kohima. She saw it as a way of helping her to relate to the wider world; it increased her interaction with her Christian peers and allowed her to participate in several youth activities organized by the church. Other young people expressed similar sentiments as reasons for conversion, including the wish to link up with other Christian communities. In fact, the Christian youth groups through their various activities, including national and international youth camps and, for instance, a choir group, present an opportunity to travel outside Nagaland regularly and to interact not only with members of other Christian communities within India, but also with Christians from outside India. Guided study of the religion also opens up such doors.

The Study of Theology Studying theology is very popular among Naga. There are two theology colleges in Nagaland, Baptist Theology College and Clark Theology College, and a number of theological institutions, such as the Discipleship College, the Servanthood College, the NBCC-sponsored Oriental Theological Seminary in Dimapur, the Kohima Bible College, and the Angami Baptist Church Council (ABCC) sponsored the Shalom Bible Seminary at Zubza, near Kohima. Some of these are co-sponsored by the Council of Baptist Churches of North East India (CBCNEI).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

202 A Matter of Belief

Some theology students go for further studies to the seminaries in Shillong, Jorhat, Serampore and Bangalore, and sometimes also outside India to the Baptist Theology colleges in the United States. Khrieleno Terhüja, the first Naga woman to graduate in theology and the third woman theology graduate in India, who is an Angami Christian, comments on the role Christianity has played in helping Naga to meet Christians outside Nagaland:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

We were brought into contact with the outside world by Christianity. Soon after a Christian community was formed, we used to send delegation to attend the Church conference outside. Today Naga are in contact with the pastors all over India and we study in theological schools and colleges in other far away states as well. (1972: 616)

The present day theology students talk about Liberation Theology (see Schreiter 1985; Shorter 1988; Aloysius 1988) as well as insisting on the need to adapt the Bible to make it more culturally acceptable to the Naga. To take a small instance, some say that the Biblical concept of ‘lamb’ when referring to Jesus as ‘Lamb of God’ is not meaningful to Naga for sheep were not used as sacrificial animals by them. Another instance is their reservation about the term kephouma being used to translate the Biblical concept of sin, as already discussed in chapter 2. Writing about the effect of training in theological colleges outside north-east India, Rao says that the students face problems when they go back to their church as ‘they bring theological views and doctrines which do not conform to the churches which sent them’ (1994: 37). Rao further observes that the recent converts to Christianity become disillusioned ‘for the higher critical studies patterned on the Western type do not seem to suit the candidates from the younger churches of the Northeast India’ (ibid.: 38).15 Nevertheless, on their return some theology students join the church, while a few others take up teaching positions in schools and colleges. One known to me had earned his doctorate in theology in the United States of America and had opened a private college in Kohima, but later returned to the USA to work for the Baptist church. If the training extends to becoming a medical doctor, then joining the Christian medical service is also a popular career choice. Naga evangelists have been instrumental in spreading Christianity to remote parts of Nagaland. Some of them even ventured into Naga villages that lie across the border in Burma (see Rao 1986; Beers 1969; Jacobs et al. 1990). Christianity is also supported by the Naga insurgent groups that have helped to introduce Christianity in some Naga villages in Burma (Jacobs et al. 1990: 177). A website maintained by one of the prominent Naga underground outfits – NSCN (IM) – showed a posed group photograph of Naga underground militia displaying a cloth banner that read ‘Nagaland for Christ’.16 On the same website, under the heading of religion, the group declared: ‘We stand for the faith in God and the salvation of mankind in Jesus, the Christ alone, that is “NAGALAND FOR CHRIST”. However, the individual freedom of religion shall be safeguarded and the imposition of this faith on others is strictly forbidden.’

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 203

Not infrequently, one can spot the pastors and members of the local church in the Angami villages talking with the Krüna villagers, urging them to join the church. In Kigwema village on a Sunday morning, I observed the pastor of the village Baptist church (who had not gone to the service, which was being conducted by the assistant pastor) talking to a Krüna young man in the front of his house. He was urging him to give up drinking rice beer (which the man was sipping from his mug, while the pastor was talking to him) and join the Baptist Church. Krüna are sometimes visited by young Christians in their khel to talk about conversion.17 This cheek-by-jowl coexistence of Christians and non-Christians, or of Christians of different denominations, is sometimes found within families and not just in the village or khel, indicating further the internal and cross-cutting interpersonal complexity of church belonging and church resistance.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Christianity in Families It is important to stress that there is a relatively high degree of freedom in the choice of one’s religion and denominational affiliation among Angami. This feature of the Angami and of Naga stands in contrast to those societies in which it becomes in effect mandatory to join or stay within the particular religion of one’s community or family. Societies of this type, it is true, are likely to be made up of competing groups, segments or strata whose identities and resources are consolidated by their respective religious organizations and perhaps marked ethno-linguistically. Although the Naga as a whole are made up of distinctive groups which compete, a pronounced sense of Naga common interest does not seem to admit of other non-Christian religions from outside. None of Hinduism, Islam or Buddhism have been adopted, perhaps because they are seen as the properties of various foreign others who are already too close and threatening, aided by the fact that the early American Baptist missionaries were so successful in establishing Christianity as the alternative to animism, managing to do without making it too closely associated with the British. Christianity is increasingly seen as a common good whose internal, competitive differentiation is not significantly mapped onto the segmentary structure of Naga ethnic groups, villages and khel. Christianity is rather made up of separate networks of ‘interpersons’ for who group, village and clan remain important for many domestic and political purposes but for who the religion is available to all regardless of these segments. It is indeed seen as the religion of the individual person who, in choosing to join or switch his brand of Christianity, interestingly reflects at this personal level the egalitarian autonomy of Naga social units generally. The person takes in and re-expresses that autonomy. It follows that it is not always the case that the members of a family belong to the same religion or the same church, and there are many instances of members belonging to different denominations. To take one example, in one

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

204 A Matter of Belief

family, while the majority belonged to the Baptist Church, one daughter had chosen to become a Catholic nun and one of the sons had joined the Baptist Revival Church, a breakaway group of the main Baptist Church. Similarly, some families included both Christians and Krüna; while some members had remained Krüna, others had converted to Christianity. In one family in Kohima village, all except the parents converted. Traditional healers may remain Krüna, even when most of their family converted. In the case of Zelouvi, the healer from Kigwema village, one of his two daughters became a devout Catholic and the other belonged to the Revival Church, while his two sons and their families remained Krüna like Zelouvi and his wife. The wife of another healer, Zao, from Jotsoma village, claimed that he had converted to the Revival faith, but when I interviewed the healer a few days later, he said he had thought about it but did not convert as his helping spirits did not allow him to do so (see also chapter 4). His wife was however a Baptist, and among his children some were Baptists and others Catholic. Zao was one of the few remaining Krüna in Jotsoma village. Today very few families have remained non-Christian in Khel-1 of Jotsoma village, which was considered the khel with the most Krüna during my first visit to the village in 1985. In other words, the earlier diversity within families of Christian and non-Christian appears to have given way to diversity within Christianity itself.

Markers of Church Differentiation

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Church Building While people choose a religion for a number of possible reasons, some of which have been described in the case of Angami, there are always influences that may or may not be recognized. Places of worship and attendant shrines develop or create associations which may be personal and/or shared, and which take on the attributes of an institution to which one belongs. As with human relationships, a break with them for whatever reason takes away the spiritual aesthetics of such belonging, and the place loses its emotional appeal for the worshipper. The different Naga Christian denominations compete, in a sense, through the tangible expression of their respective places of worship as well as through spiritual messages. The buildings they erect can become significant markers of their particular religious distinctiveness. The perceived prominence of church buildings in Naga villages and towns is thus an integral part of what could be called a Christian landscape (see figures 6.2 and 6.4). The sheer size of the church buildings set them apart from other structures as a prominent feature in any Naga village. Since the villages are located on spurs or shoulders of hills, a church generally stands out in the village. Most churches have been built following a similar architectural design with a slant roof and a bell tower. The size is also a reflection of how prosperous the church is. As

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 205

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

almost all the land is privately owned, non-availability of a suitable site can delay the construction of a church building. As mentioned earlier, the Catholic mission was unable to build a church until land became available with the help of local converts. A church is built either on land that has been donated by a member or that has been purchased with church funds. The location is generally chosen depending on closeness to the village khel to which most members belong, or else the church is built on a site that is at a convenient distance for most people. It is not necessary for each khel to have its own church corresponding to the denominational majority, and in some villages two church buildings can be situated very close to each other in the same khel. In Kohima village, which has four khel and six churches, the Baptist Mission church and Christian Revival church are in T-khel; the Baptist Revival church is in L-khel; the second Christian Revival church is situated below L-khel on Kenuozou hill; the Catholic church is in P-khel; and the Khedi Baptist church is situated between D- and T-khel. In Kigwema, although the four churches are located with one in each of the four khel, their location does not correspond with the denominational affiliation of the khel members. The Baptist church, which has the largest membership, is situated in the centre of the village in Khamima-khel. The Revival church that boasts the second largest membership is situated in Makhuma-khel, followed by the Catholic church in Kephoma-

Figure 6.2 A Christian landscape: a view of churches in T-khel of Kohima village from the mission compound. In the foreground is the Rivenburg Chapel, the first church begun by the American Baptist missionaries in Kohima. It is now used as a chapel by the students of the Baptist College, Kohima. In the background is the Baptist Mission church and behind it the Christian Revival church, 2011.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

206 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.3 Baptist church in Merhema-khel of Khonoma village, which celebrated its centenary in 1996. The sheer size of the church buildings sets them apart from other structures as prominent features in any Naga village, 2006.

khel, and the youngest church, the Pentecostal, is located almost on the outskirts of the village in Merama-khel. Khonoma village, which has only two denominations – Baptist and Catholic, has a very big Baptist church building situated prominently in the middle of Merhema-khel (see figure 6.3), opposite to the old entrance to the khel, while the fledgling Catholic church, a small structure in 1997, was situated on the outskirts, on the approach road to the village in Merhema-khel. In 2006 the Catholics in Khonoma celebrated fifty years (or golden jubilee) of Catholicism by building a new church on the hill slope nearly a kilometre outside the village. How do the various clergy within their respective churches manage such denominational diversity? Church Offices The Baptist churches are members of the Naga Baptist Church Council (NBCC), and are also affiliated to the Council of Baptist Churches in North East India (CBCNEI). A Baptist church has a pastor, an assistant pastor, evangelists and five deacons. Most of the pastors and assistant pastors in the churches in Nagaland are not trained in the ministry, and a majority are not officially ordained, but have received a license that amounts to ordination (see also Downs 1992: 226; Rao 1994: 36–38). The pastors are generally from the local community. The deacons are chosen from among the elders from various khel for a period of five years.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 207

The Catholic churches, in contrast, normally have a Jesuit priest, an assistant priest and sisters that are non-Naga and predominantly from south India. The first Angami priest, Father Carolus Neisalhou Kuostu of Zhadima village, was ordained in 1989.18 In recent years some Angami girls have also joined the order of nuns. Among the Revival churches, the Pentecostal Church has pastors and nuns or lie-thou-mia, ‘one devoted to worship’. There are only a few Angami pastors and nuns as the majority belong to the neighbouring Chakhesang Naga group. The Revival churches typically have a pastor, an assistant or associate pastor (depending on the size of the church), a church secretary, a few evangelists, and ten deacons. The pastors and deacons have no restriction on the number of years in office, while the secretary and evangelists are appointed for a threeyear term. In addition, there are women and men who are appointed prayer managers or prayer housekeepers. Known as kehcü-ki-kepfe (literally ‘prayerhouse-keeper’), they are generally unmarried and devote their lives to praying. Upon marriage they leave their position as prayer managers. I was told that pastorship is a sought after occupation. One pastor I interviewed had been trained in a theological college, but claimed that most pastors of the Revival Church are born to be religious teachers; that they get their vocation from God and hence do not go for formal Revival training. The division of labour in the Baptist Revival church of Kohima village will give an idea of the working of the church and the representation of people from different khel in these offices. The church has one pastor, who is from L-khel, and three associate pastors, two from L-khel and one from D-khel. It has two church evangelists, one from D-khel, and another, who especially looks after the interests of the youth, from L-khel. There are fifteen deacons – six from L-khel and three each from three other khel of the village. Except for five women deacons, all the other church officers are men. With the above brief discussion of the aspects of the different churches – their buildings and clergy, we get an idea of the similarities and differences among different denominations. Despite the churches having (or aspiring for) similarly imposing buildings, each has distinctive forms of internal organization and involvement of laity in church affairs. This pattern of distinctiveness and similarity becomes even more evident when we compare liturgies and their effect on congregations. Church Services Most churches have a schedule of services displayed at the entrance, either on the boundary wall or on a noticeboard placed right above the entrance to the church. The programme spells out the weekly schedule for Sunday services, evening prayer meetings, Bible classes and meetings of the women’s committee and youth groups.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

208 A Matter of Belief

On Sundays, special Bible classes are also held for the children who are additionally taught hymns. There is a special interest in music, and choir singing is very popular. Church music was first introduced by the American Baptist missionaries who had recognized Naga interest in music and songs. Supplee, the last American Baptist missionary to serve at Kohima station, himself had an interest in music. He is credited with propagating music activity by teaching choir singing and translating hymns into Angami,19 as well as forming a Naga student band (Puthenpurakal 1984: 123–24; Supplee letters 1940–1947). Today choir singing is very popular and the local television broadcasts regularly telecast choir music from different Naga churches. Some choir groups have travelled to other Indian states and also abroad to participate in Christian conventions. Hymns are sung in regular Sunday services in all churches. The services in various denominational churches, although sharing a basic pattern, differ in certain ways from each other. The text that follows discusses the similarities and differences in the services of churches belonging to different denominations. Distinctive features of Naga worship were noticed by some early ethnographers, most prominently by Smith, who was a missionary as well as sociologist studying the Ao Naga group. In 1925 Smith described a religious service in an Ao church as follows:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Here they find some opportunity for self-expression through the singing and prayers. A Naga prayer meeting is decidedly interesting. All the people pray audibly, each one saying his own prayer. At times there seems to be a sort of contest of endurance to see who can pray longest and loudest. Then, during the sermon or prayer by the preacher, the audience frequently signifies its approval by deep guttural grunts. (Smith 1925: 193)

The description could easily have been of a church prayer meeting in any Naga church of today. Confirming the impression of Naga Christianity as in some respects highly personalized, very audible individual praying is common in most church services. The service often culminates in people saying personal prayers in a loud whisper with their eyes tightly shut. The church meetings of most denominations follow a similar plan of a sermon, singing of hymns, collection and personal praying. The Revival Church services, including the Pentecostal Church, characteristically differ from others. Singing of hymns, accompanied by musical instruments such as the guitar and drums, is part of the regular Sunday church service. I have attended services that range from those held on Sunday mornings to those in the afternoons and evenings in churches belonging to different denominations. Sunday morning service is the occasion when everyone dresses up in their ‘Sunday best’. Generally, women wear sarongs and shawls, and young girls prefer to dress in skirts (see figure 6.4). Men wear trousers and shirt, over which a traditional shawl is worn. The different liturgies which I have heard give us some idea of the appeal of particular churches to those who convert to them. It is instructive to compare

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 209

Figure 6.4 Women returning after the morning service at the Catholic church in Kohima village. They are wearing Angami Lohe cloth. Traditional cloths are worn during formal occasions as an identity marker, but it is not uncommon to see such cloths used as daily wear combined with the universal Western dress, 1995.

the denominational liturgies in the chronological order of their entry into the Angami area, beginning with that of the Baptist Church.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Baptist Church Being the first Christian denomination to come to Nagaland, the Baptist Church still has the largest following in Nagaland, including the Angami among whom almost every village has a Baptist church. As well as attending their services on Sundays I have done so at Christmas, and at midnight mass on New Year’s Eve. In Khonoma village, which has an imposing church, I attended a Sunday morning and a Christmas Day service. The church was almost full during the Sunday service, with the congregation divided into three columns: the choir sitting to the left, consisting of young men and women and older children;20 the middle column mainly of women; and the right-hand column of pews occupied by men. On the dais, on the extreme right, facing the pastor, sat the five deacons from the village. The service began with the pastor reading a sermon (which emphasized the need for righteousness and for devotion to one’s vocation). Thereafter, the church choir from Khonoma (that had been selected to participate in regional choir singing in Guwahati in Assam) came onto the dais accompanied by their

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

210 A Matter of Belief

conductor to sing a few hymns. Most members of the choir wore the white shawl with brown and black stripes that is the typical cloth of the Khonoma group of villages. An elderly man, who was disabled, came onto the dais and gave a small speech during which an offertory collection was made. This was followed by the pastor informing the congregation of how previous collections had been used and how the present collection would be used for helping the needy in other states; he also made certain announcements regarding the upcoming events of a youth activity programme. Thereafter, everybody said a personal prayer. At the end of the service, everyone stood up and sang a hymn in Angami. In the same church in Khonoma, I also attended the Christmas Day service in the early afternoon. The church had been decorated with the holly and poinsettias that grow in abundance in this region. Most of the women wore the traditional (Khonoma) white shawl and sarong, or only the white shawl draped over a modern sarong or a Western dress. The service was long and drawn out, and during it two separate choirs came to the dais to sing hymns. One person from the congregation gave an impassioned speech in Angami in which he referred to the role played by Khonoma villagers in fighting for secession from India. In contrast to the above two services, the one I attended in Kigwema Baptist church was quite low key. Although Baptists have the largest following in the village and have the biggest church building, the attendance for the Sunday service was poor. People trickled in slowly and the service, instead of beginning at 9.30 A.M., started only at 10 A.M. The assistant pastor conducted it, as the pastor was away. The service began with a sermon followed by singing of hymns by a choir comprised of four young men and women. During the singing, the collection plate was passed around. In contrast, the Revival, Catholic and Pentecostal church services that I had attended in Kigwema and Kohima villages were more physically exuberant and carried out with more vigorously expressed enthusiasm.

Catholic Church I attended the Catholic church services in Kohima town and village, and at Loyola College, near Jakhama village. The Kohima Catholic church was established in 1952, the year Catholic missionaries were given permission to carry out evangelistic work in the region, thus it celebrated its golden jubilee in the year 2002. The new church building in P-khel of Kohima village is similar in size to the other churches, especially the Khedi Baptist and the Baptist Revival. The first half of the service was a solemn affair, which began with the priest reading out a sermon. This was followed by the singing of hymns and, finally, by the saying of personal prayer. Personal praying is very similar to that in other churches: people close the eyes tightly and pray very loudly in Angami.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 211

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In the middle of the mass a collection was made by two people. The mass culminated in the sacrament for which everyone went one at a time to the dais to receive communion from the priest. I saw an elaborate thanksgiving service in November 2006 which was followed by a communal feasting, and also attended two services, in English and Angami, in Kohima Cathedral in 2011 (see figure 6.5). Another Catholic service that I was able to attend was at the Jesuit Loyola school church. On every first Sunday of the month the Catholics from Kigwema village come to this church for the Sunday mass. I reached the church towards the end of the mass when a children’s choir was singing some hymns in Nagamese and Angami. The melody reminded me of folksongs that I had heard during the traditional festivals in Angami villages. Interestingly, when I inquired about the melody, it turned out that the hymns had been set to Angami folk tunes. I was told that increasingly an effort is being made by the church to incorporate folk tunes, so as to maintain continuity with the traditional culture. The Revival church services stand out as distinctive in certain important respects from other church services. They include exuberant singing during

Figure 6.5 Father Carolus Neisalhou Kuotsü, the first Angami ordained priest performing sacrament after the Sunday morning service in Kohima Cathedral. In the background can be seen crossed Naga spears, symbolizing peace, and the painted dao machete. Not visible in the photo is the stylized mithun head painted on the altar under the feet of crucified Jesus Christ, 2011.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

212 A Matter of Belief

which some people go into a trance-like state and sometimes speak rapidly in an incomprehensible way – in other words ‘speaking in tongues’ or glossolalia.

Baptist Revival Church Kohima village has three Revival churches: two so-called Christian Revival churches and one Baptist Revival church. The original Revival church was founded during the first wave of the Revival movement that came to Kohima in the 1960s. According my informants, in recent years, due to certain ‘misunderstandings’, the Revival church split up, and the second church known as the Kenuozo Christian Revival church was formed. The Baptist Revival church established in 1979 was a breakaway group from the main Baptist church. The Baptist Revival church building has been recently built. Inside the church, on the panelled wall facing the congregation, the following verse from the Bible in Angami communicates crisply what is seen by its adherents as the essence of the church: Kerhie khashü kezhou we Ruopfüu zo

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The spirit gives life (kerhie, ‘life’; ruopfü, ‘spirit’)

Johan 6:63 John 6:63

I attended a Sunday service at which the church was almost full. The Baptist Revival church has five hundred active members, of whom about three hundred were present, mostly from the younger age group. The service began with the pastor reading a sermon, followed by hymn singing by two choirs. One of the choirs consisted of five men, one of whom was Niebu, the healer (see chapter 4) I had interviewed before, who sang to the accompaniment of a guitar. This was followed by the singing of a few hymns by the congregation that culminated in the chanting of ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Hallelujah’, with people clapping their hands (see figure 6.6). Then the congregation became quiet and a woman guest21 (who was a member of the prayer group from the Pentecostal church) came onto the dais to give a sermon on the power of the Holy Spirit. During the service the offertory bag was passed around. The church service concluded with personal praying, towards the end of which people once again began to clap and a few of them began to shake vigorously. Amidst the rapid chanting of ‘Hallelujah’, a couple of people made ululation known as pfhenei-e in Angami.22

Revival Church The Revival church service that I attended was on a Sunday morning at 9 A.M. in Kigwema village, and there was another held in Kohima village at the Christian Revival Church (see figure 6.7). The Kigwema church was full to capacity and some people were even standing outside the hall. The service

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 213

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.6 Culmination of the Sunday morning service in the chanting of ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Hallelujah’, with people clapping their hands. Congregation at the Baptist Revival church, Kohima village, 1997.

Figure 6.7 Sunday morning service at the Christian Revival church, Kohima village. The congregation is listening to the sermon by a guest pastor, 2006.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

214 A Matter of Belief

began with a prayer by the pastor to bless the newly born babies that had been brought into the church for the first time. A prayer followed for those who were sick. Thereafter the pastor read his sermon followed by personal praying. The service in the church reached a kind of euphoric climax when everyone stood up and extended their arms above their heads (some holding a copy of the Bible in their outstretched hands), and started praying earnestly and in loud voices. During this service a high-ranking officer from Kohima town, who originally belonged to Kigwema village, had also come down to pray with his wife. I was told that they had begun to pray regularly at the church after the wife’s recovery from cancer. She had been suffering for some time, having been told in 1991 by doctors at a hospital in Vellore (in Tamilnadu) that she had only a couple of years to live. On the suggestion of some relatives they came to the Kigwema Revival church to pray for her health in 1993. It is said that soon afterwards she began to show improvement and subsequently was judged to have survived. As a result of this miraculous recovery they changed their church affiliation from the Baptist to the Revival church. Despite something of a common pattern, it can be seen that very few details of the Revival church service are shared with the Baptist church, while those of the Pentecostal church differ even more.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Pentecostal Church The youngest church in Kigwema is Pentecostal. A middle-aged woman named Amo is credited with bringing the Pentecostal faith to Kigwema. It is said that she had been suffering from an illness and went to a hospital in Vellore for treatment, but was not healed. She then went to a Pentecostal convention in Dimapur after which her health improved. The church is located away from the rest of the village, in Merama-khel, near tall bamboo groves. I was late for the Sunday service at the Pentecostal church, and when I reached the site the congregation was breaking up and I saw several people coming out of the church. When I looked inside the church, I saw some young men and women inside, packing up guitars, drums and cymbals. Outside the church, people were putting on their footwear, which they had had to remove before entering the church as is mandatory in Pentecostalism. The church is physically the most distinctive. Unlike the others, the Pentecostal church does not have a dais and rows of pews to sit on inside the building, although inside the Kigwema church there were a couple of pews at the back of the church. The rest of the hall is devoid of any furniture, and the floor space covered with straw mats for the congregation to sit on during the prayer service. Since the Pentecostal church at Kigwema also conducts evening service three times a week, I was able to attend one of these, in the company of two friends who were not members of the Pentecostal church. When we reached the church,

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 215

there was still some time before the service began and we met the pastor outside the church. The pastor belonged to the Chakhesang Naga group among whom the Revival movement has become popular. The pastor was wearing the Pentecostal clergy’s dress – a white shirt over a white sarong. He invited us into his residence and we talked for a short while before setting off for the church. Just about then there was a power failure (a recurrent problem in Nagaland) and we had to use torchlight to find our way back to the church. Before entering the church we all removed our shoes. The three of us sat on the pews at the back of the hall and were given copies of the booklet that contained the hymns that are sung during the Pentecostal service. These were in three languages – English, Nagamese and Angami. As there was no electricity, the interior of the church had been illuminated by candlelight; the candles were placed in the front of the hall before the congregation. Compared to the numbers I had seen coming out of the church after the Sunday service, the evening congregation was small – there were only around twenty people, most of them women. Two ‘nuns’ in white sarees sat in the same row as the pastor, facing the congregation. After a short sermon by the pastor, one of the nuns began playing a drum, to whose beat everyone sang hymns. In a short while, amidst the singing of hymns, the pastor began to sway and his upper body began to jerk; he seemed in a state of trance. Some members of the congregation also began to do likewise. Towards the end the drum beat became louder and quicker, and everyone began to sing in a rapid manner and chant ‘Bless the Lord’. This was interspersed with shrill cries of ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Ukepenuopfü’ accompanied by swaying and trembling among a few people in the congregation. After a short period, everyone calmed down and returned to a normal pace of hymn singing. During this the collection plate was passed around. People from other denominations find the ways of Pentecostal worship and their belief in faith healing strange. One of my informants from the village of Kigwema told me that one of his neighbours had spearheaded the Pentecostal movement in his village. According to him she would pray very loudly late into the night, so that in the stillness of the night her voice could be heard very clearly. He added that loud praying disturbed others and it seemed that ‘it is done deliberately so that everyone could hear them pray’. The use of musical instruments such as drums and guitars during the service is also condemned by other villagers, who call their services ‘noisy’. I met several people who repeated the view of Pentecostalism as strange, both because of the style of worship and of the bar on giving medicine to the sick. Earlier observers of the different church liturgies found the loud personal prayers of the Baptists peculiarly distinctive and an element cutting across the worshipping styles of different denominations among the Angami. But praying in Baptist church services is subdued in comparison with the more exuberant charismatic Revival and Pentecostal churches, with the Catholic church falling somewhere in between these two categories. But how do congregations react to these different styles of worship? Do they colour their choice of which church to affiliate with?

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

216 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Movement from One Church to Another Shifting an allegiance from one church to another has become common in recent years, especially since the entry of charismatic Revival movements into Nagaland, and a number of cases came to my attention. An informant who worked in a government office and was also a part-time traditional bone setter, had at the time of my fieldwork recently switched membership from the Baptist church to the Baptist Revival church in Kohima village. According to him what attracted him to the Revival church was the concept of prophecy, especially the way some people were able to get prophetic visions during the church service. He said that, while praying in the church, he could feel the power of the Holy Spirit when the congregation broke out in loud praying and ‘speaking in tongues’ or glossolalia. Pointing to Corinthians 14, ‘gifts of prophecy and tongues’, he added that the Revival church draws heavily on this section of the Bible which concerns speaking in tongues and prophecy during church worship. Similar reasons for conversion were given by another informant, a herbalist from Jotsoma village, who worked in the Science College as a laboratory assistant. He had been a member of the Baptist church until 1981. When the first Revival church was set up in his village, he decided to move to that church because he found it emotionally more satisfying; its spiritual and charismatic aspect made him feel the proximity of the Holy Spirit. Marriage is another factor leading to moves from one church to another. Although interdenominational marriages are not that common, where they do occur it is usually the wife who moves to her husband’s church, reflecting existing patrilineal and virilocal custom. One young school teacher (who was also a masseuse) had been a Baptist like the rest of her family, but on marriage to her Catholic husband, decided to convert to Catholicism. When I asked her why, she replied that had she remained a Baptist, she would have been the only person in her husband’s family attending different church for the Sunday service. It is worth noting that such cases of wives adopting, ‘patrilocally’, the denomination of a husband and family goes against the occurrence in other situations of families containing members of different affiliations. In the 1950s and then in the late 1970s, when the Revival movement picked up in Nagaland, a number of new churches were established. Some of these were formed by former Baptists who wanted to set up a church in which more importance was given to the Holy Spirit in Christianity. In addition, some new churches, like the Seventh Day Adventists, the Assembly of God and the breakaway Baptist churches were formed by those members who did not agree with the way the parent church was being run,23 emphasizing that their way of worshipping was purer than that of the other church members and necessitating separatism. As a result, in some villages there are churches of more than three denominations. For example, Kohima village has six churches, namely Khedi Baptist, Catholic, Christian Revival, Baptist Revival, Baptist Mission and Kenuozou Christian Revival. I was told that the Kenuozou church was formed after some

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 217

misunderstanding occurred between the members of the breakaway Christian Revival church; Kigwema village has four churches: Baptist, Catholic, Revival and Pentecostal. That said, most Angami villages have two churches, belonging to either of the two major denominations, namely Baptist or Catholic. However, in some villages, for example, in Zhadima, the dominant Baptist church is absent and instead we find three Revival churches – Christian Revival and two ‘AG’ or Assembly of God churches – besides the Catholic church. Over and above such combinations and admixtures of church affiliation, movement and location which have developed into the present, there are communal rituals and celebrations that mark out contemporary Christianity as a whole and illustrate to Angami a wider level of coherence than that of the person, family, clan or village.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Christian Communal Celebrations Celebrations commemorating the coming of Christianity to the Angami area (and the rest of Nagaland) are special occasions marked by communal participation on a large scale. Several events are held to raise funds for the organization of such events. Most popular among these are fairs in which each member of the church participates. One such large-scale fair was organized in 1996 to raise funds for the 125th year of Christianity (Baptist Church) in Nagaland. In such fairs, items ranging from farm produce to handicrafts are sold. Funds are also raised through arranging smaller events such as community feasts, for which tickets are sold. I attended one such event in 1997, which was organized by the Kohima village Catholic church to raise funds for the new church building. Evident were the banners that announced the ‘quasiquicentennial’ (i.e. 125th anniversary) celebrations24 that were to take place in the month of November in 1997, displayed at prominent places in the town. Although it referred to the coming of the American Baptist missionaries, I was told that other denominations might also participate as an acknowledgment of the 125 years since the introduction of Christianity to the region. During my visit in January 2001, however, I inquired about the participation of other denominations and was told that it was mainly a Baptist Christian celebration, with people from other denominations attending only as spectators. This slight difference is less one of time than of the fragile compromise between the tendency for denominations to wish to remain distinctive and their recognition that, politically, it is the Christian church as a whole and in all its guises that may reconcile opposed segments of Naga society. A large-scale Christian gathering that I was able to attend more than two decades ago was the final day of the Baptist Centenary celebration in Kohima in November 1985. A large stage had been built in the football ground, which was decorated in the style of a traditional Angami rich man’s house. The gable

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

218 A Matter of Belief

was decorated with horns and painted with traditional sun and moon symbols. Pots of flowering orchids lined the stage. At the far end of the stadium, a huge wooden post decorated with traditional animal symbols of tiger, hornbill and suchlike had been erected. The whole stadium was packed with people sitting on chairs and some squatting on the ground in front of the podium. Souvenirs such as caps, keyrings, and T-shirts with the phrase ‘Baptist centenary’ printed on them were being sold. Besides the speeches given by various church delegates, choirs from different Baptist churches sang hymns in Nagamese, Angami and English. The celebrations culminated in dance performances: groups of young men and women performed the traditional dance wearing the ceremonial attire worn during festivals such as Sekrenyi (see chapter 3). Inclusion of such dance performance as well as use of traditional symbols for decorating the stage point towards a change in the Baptist Christian attitude to traditional culture as it had been propagated by the American Baptist missionaries. Where once the wearing of traditional dress and the performance of traditional dance had met with disapproval, the same dances – having become an integral part of Naga and Angami identity – were now an essential part of large church functions. In April 1991, when Kohima Cathedral was opened, the whole ceremony was conducted in what was agreed as being a traditional way. In February 2010, the Angami Baptist Church Council (ABCC) celebrated 125 years of Christianity. It was celebrated on a large scale in which traditional cultural markers were combined with contemporary dance and music (short video recordings of some of the events are available on internet sites like You Tube). Baptist visitors from the United States, some of whom were descendents of the American Baptist missionaries to the Angami, were invited to grace the occasion. A commemorative volume was published containing short biographies of the American missionaries and the first few Angami evangelists. Most revealing are the old photographs in the souvenir (ABCC 2010), with one from 1935 showing a visitor from the American Baptist Foreign Ministry wearing Angami ‘full dress’ which had been given to him by the Angami. The dress comprised sashes, ear ornaments, spear and, interestingly, a chest decoration which would have been worn only by a warrior of repute.25 Since the mid-1990s, a number of Angami villages have celebrated the centenary of the Baptist church. In 1997, I could still spot the placards that had been put up the previous year. In Khonoma village, which had celebrated the centenary of its Baptist church in 1996, one could still see small placards with verses from the Bible written on them that had been nailed onto the trees along the approach road to the village as well as onto those inside the village. As a part of the same celebrations, a commemorative monolith had also been erected about a kilometre away from the centre of the village at the ‘resting spot’ on the village path that led to the Baptist primary school and the jhum fields.26 I was told that the fully carved monolith was first placed in the church, and from there it was dragged to its present place in a ceremonial procession.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 219

Besides the monolith, epitaphs for the first two Christian converts from the village, namely Nisier and Heizelung, were also erected. The practice of installing monoliths to commemorate an event has deep historical roots among the Angami, although the context has changed. In the past such monoliths were erected in the name of the person who had completed a series of feasts of merit. Today, such feasts are rarely given but, as we have seen above, the monoliths are installed to commemorate church centenaries, besides being installed as lineage stones and as memorials to Naga nationalist martyrs. Since the mid-1990s a number of churches in different villages have erected such commemorative monoliths. The celebrations at the time of these installations are carried out in much the same way as those of the past, but with Christian prayers replacing traditional ritual incantation. The young men and women don traditional attire and the men drag the stone, with rope made out of twisted jungle creepers, onto a wooden sledge. Although I have not seen such a ceremony, I have heard descriptions from some of my informants who have witnessed them. I once saw such a monolith on a wooden sledge outside the Catholic church of Loyola College at Jakhama. I was told that the chiselled rock had been brought from the forests and would be installed as a ‘jubilee stone’ to commemorate the establishment of the Catholic Church in Jakhama. In 1985 the Angami Baptist Church Council erected a monolith to commemorate a century of Christianity in Kohima. It is located at the mission compound, outside the ABCC office in Kohima. These installations culminate in communal feasting to which every member of the church contributes. Communal feasting is also held at Christmas. In most villages, especially in the Northern and Western groups of Angami villages, Christmas has become a major festival during which a large quantity of meat is consumed. Mithun bison are specially slaughtered for this feast. I witnessed preparations for a Christmas feast in khel-4 of Jotsoma village where two mithun were killed for the purpose. Christmas is also the time when other animals such as buffalo and pigs are killed and a share in the meat is bought by kinsmen or neighbours prior to its cutting up. I have attended one such feast held by Merhema-khel of Khonoma village. The mithun meat was strung in bamboo strips and then cooked in huge cauldrons in the space in front of the youth centre. Later in the evening, the whole khel gathered in the open meeting ground near the church where young men and women served the food (see figure 6.8). Before eating it, all present said the grace. It is perhaps an indication of their contemporary relevance that I have not come across any texts or letters referring to such public feasting accompanying liturgical events during the initial years of Christianity. According to the Catholic Church history, celebration of Christmas and Easter commenced with the coming of the Catholic mission into the Naga area (see George 1990; Syiemlieh 1990). In 1953 Christmas was celebrated in the middle of Kohima village in a school building, and the midnight mass was attended to full capacity. On Christmas Day, bara khana (colonial Hindi term for a large

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

220 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.8 The communal Christmas feast of the Baptist church of Merhema-khel in Khonoma village taking place after the Christmas morning service. Young church volunteers are seen serving the food, including mithun bison (Bos frontalis) meat that is consumed on special occasions and is considered a symbol of prosperity in Nagaland, 1990.

communal feast) was held, and large paper star decorations were hoisted on tall bamboo poles (Syiemlieh 1990: 45). This tradition has continued among the Naga Christians and is the most prominent sight during the Christmas and New Year celebrations, when large red stars decorate many buildings and houses in the state. Today, Christmas is given as much importance as the annual festival of Sekrenyi. It seems that while celebration of Christmas provides a Christian identity, the celebration of Sekrenyi is an assertion of Angami identity. In this growth of different denominations shaping and shaped by distinctive congregations, liturgies and personal choice, faith healing emerged as a distinctive feature embraced to a greater or lesser extent by different churches. The idiom of Christianity as the religion of healing has been regarded in the conflict-ridden areas of the modern world as arguably its most distinctive feature. As Naga, the Angami know the power of this idiom through their own experience of the ongoing violence of the factional in-fighting of the separatist movement. As individuals seeking help for personal sickness and ill-health, however, how do they respond to the various kinds of healing services provided by the church? This is the subject of the next chapter.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Contemporary Christianity and the Healing Spirit 221

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. See http://www.kohimadiocese.org/history.html, accessed 15 July 2010. 2. Retrieved 14 July 2010 from www.nagalandpost.com, and 15 July 2010 from www. morungexpress.com. 3. This information was given to me by Dr Visier Sanyü, a historian, who himself hails from Merhema-khel of Khonoma village. Jasokie changed his name from Zinyü to John Bosco. He was a prominent figure in the NNC and was the founder (and general secretary) of the Naga People’s Convention which was instrumental in the formation of Nagaland state. Jasokie twice served as the chief minister of Nagaland. 4. Some of the villages were: Jotsoma, Keruma, Merema, Nerhema, Khonoma, Jakhama, Zubza, Kigwema and Kidima (see map 1.4). 5. The cathedral, built with the money donated by the Japanese, British, Naga and several others, is dedicated to the memory of those who died during the Battle of Kohima in 1944. Its opening ceremony included the ceremonial laying of Naga spears at the altar by the visiting Allied and Japanese war veterans, which symbolized peace and friendship between the two (retrieved 15 July 2010 from www.kohimadiocese.org). The round building is supposed to reflect the traditional architectural style of a Naga youth dormitory (Joshi [Patel] 1994a). 6. See also, Martin (2010) for articles on incorporation of indigenous symbols and traditions in the Catholic Church. 7. See also, Oppitz et al. (2008: 153, 341–42) for a photograph of a chasuble made of Lotha lungpensü cloth and an interview with the former bishop of Kohima diocese. 8. See also Pachuau (2002: chapter 5), on revivals and inculturation of Christianity among the Mizo people. 9. See Luithui and Haksar 1984; Iralu 2000; and Chasie 1999. The brutality of the Indian Army is also the subject of Naga literature – e.g. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone by Temsula Ao (2000). She was awarded the Padam Shri, a civilian honour, in 2007 by the Government of India. 10. While the churches in the Angami villages witnessed a split, a similar wave of revival among the Ao did not lead to such a splitting of the church. Luen writes that the Baptist Christians accepted the revival only when convinced by their pastors that it was not linked to Pentecostal church, expelling from the village any member who wanted to form a separate church (Luen 2009: xx). 11. Acts 2:1–4: ‘When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.’ 12. In January 2011, Chiechama Revival church celebrated the fifty years (golden jubilee) since its establishment. 13. See Sundar (2011) for a critical analysis of Indian security forces’ tactics of village grouping to contain insurgency among the Mizo and Naga peoples of north-east India. 14. See also the case study of Khreileno Terhüja in the report by the National Commission for Women (2005: 61–62) on the impact of armed conflict on women in north-east India. 15. He further writes that most students from the north-east opt for professional courses or secular education, and the students who go in for theology are mostly those who have not been able to secure admission elsewhere (Rao 1994: 38). 16. URL: http://www.angelfire.com/mi/Nagalim/nscn.html, accessed in 1999. The photograph is no longer available on the web page, but the idea of a Naga Christian nation is articulated on the web page of Nagalim at the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization: see, Nagalim at www.unpo.org (retrieved 10 September 2010). 17. During the course of my fieldwork one of my Catholic acquaintances had also asked me to consider joining her church.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

222 A Matter of Belief

18. Interestingly, the photograph of the ordination published in the Catholic Church Souvenir (George 1990) shows the Angami priest in a white ordination robe which had been made from the traditional white ceremonial lohra-mhoshü cloth of the Angami Naga. I was told that the Angami priests have an option of wearing the chasuble either of lohra-mhoshü or plain white cloth at the mass. 19. In 1994, one of Supplee’s daughters visited Kohima. I was told at Khonoma church that she conducted a service in Angami and sang old Angami hymns which were written by her father and his Angami assistants. 20. Younger children attended the Bible classes for them that were being held in classrooms at a lower level in the church. 21. This lady was a well-educated person and she told me that she had travelled to Britain and had also been to the offices of the United Pentecostal Church. 22. Pfhenei-e is made by both men and women; the modulation of sound differs according to the occasion. Interestingly, the sound which I heard at the Baptist Revival church service and also at the Pentecostal service in Kohima was similar to the one I had heard in the Sunday service of a Revival church I had attended in Oxford in 1996. 23. Downs labels these churches sectarian on the basis that these comprise ‘relatively small Protestant groups that are exclusivistic, not recognizing the legitimacy of the other Christian groups and hence seeking their members from among them’ (1992: 226). 24. These gatherings invariably acquire political overtones. The November 1997 celebrations resulted in several declarations in support of the Naga movement. A short passage from an open letter by Sundquist (Executive Director of American Baptist International Ministries), who had attended the November celebrations, illustrates this: ‘I believe these underground leaders are devoted Christians wrought [sic] with frustration for their people, but they are also looking for a peaceful avenue to freedom. Many Christian leaders pleaded with me to use the occasion of the 125 Year Celebration of Christianity in Nagaland as an opportunity to speak out against the violence and call for reconciliation among the Naga people’ (http://www.wfn. org/1998/01/msg00027.html; http://www.angelfire.com/mo/Nagaland/ABC.html, accessed February 1999; Sundquist 1999). 25. Another photograph in the souvenir (ABCC 2010) shows three American missionaries, including the last one to Angami mission, Reverend Supplee, on a Harley Davidson motorcycle – a much admired mode of transport that was used by the missionaries in Naga Hills. 26. I had seen the same stone in 1995 on my visit to Khonoma. That time it had just been brought from the forests, in a roughly chiselled state, and had been placed horizontally under a tree near the school.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Chapter 7

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

CHURCH AND HEALING

The emphasis on healing that characterized the original introduction of Christianity to the Naga has become greater. As new church denominations have proliferated, there has been a widening of healing practices, with each church seeking to offer its own kinds of relief from suffering.1 Despite such diversity, the different healing methods converge sufficiently to allow people generally to agree on diagnoses and treatments, as will be evident from a concluding case study in this chapter of a young woman thought to be suffering from demonic possession. Beginning with the Revival Church in Nagaland, healing is through prayer and the laying on of hands, sometimes through healing camps which became popular towards the end of the twentieth century. In this chapter I describe these healing camps from the end of the millennium as being essentially concerned with curing the physical and mental ailments of individuals and of conferring on those who attend a general sense of Christian spiritual well-being. At the end of this chapter I will look at the development of community healing events or festivals which take on or merge with the accelerating concern to reconcile the warring factionalism of the three separatist movements, which has resulted in so much loss of life. In other words, within the church’s various communal occasions we see an increasing emphasis on healing the society and not just the body. But first, let me describe the circumstances in which the early revival crusades began in Nagaland in order to understand the ongoing work of the healing camps and their genesis in the selective integration of Christian and non-Christian ideas and practices. Before the large-scale healing gatherings that have become a regular occurrence in Nagaland, a prominent figure in the Naga Baptist church was Reverend Longri Ao. He was renowned for his role in setting up peace talks in the period 1964–72 between the Indian Government and the Naga nationalists.2 As the peace talks began to crumble, he organized major evangelistic crusades in various Nagaland towns (Dimapur, Kohima and Mokokchung) in 1969–70 (Rao 1986: 110). In November 1972, Reverend Longri Ao and the Nagaland Missionary Movement (founded by him in 1971) managed to invite Reverend Billy Graham to Nagaland for a crusade in Kohima which was reportedly attended by nearly a hundred thousand people from all over Nagaland and neighbouring areas.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

224 A Matter of Belief

Reverend Billy Graham and his entourage were allowed to enter Nagaland by the Indian Government on the understanding that there would be no violence (shooting and ambushing) by the Naga nationalists during the crusade.3 The Naga nationalists also gave an undertaking that they would not use violence unless provoked by the Indian security forces to retaliate (Nuh and Lasuh 2002).4 As a result of the Billy Graham crusade, many converted to Christianity, and several gospel camps were organized. Many educated Angami, some serving in the Nagaland state government, became ‘born-again Christians’ (Peseyie-Maase 2009: 32–33). During the revival, churches became crowded with worshippers who prayed and fasted. Money was donated and labour provided for the extension of church buildings. Among the newly converted Naga groups in Tuensang and Mon districts, skulls collected as war trophies were burned because of their association with pre-Christian practices (ibid.).5 Luen (2009) also writes about the wave of revival that swept through the Ao villages during which people spoke in tongues, the sick were healed, the blind could see and the lame could walk again.6 Peseyie-Maase (2009: 30) writes that ‘a real spiritual test’ (i.e. the capacity of the people’s faith to endure atrocities) began during the 1970s when the Naga nationalist movement intensified and Angami villagers were forced to take refuge in the forest for days as Indian security forces carried out combing operations. According to Peseyie-Maase, since the ‘entry of the gospel’ the highest conversions took place when revival swept through the region during these intensified periods of persecution by the Indian security forces (ibid.).

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Healing Camps The Revival Church in Nagaland is well known for the healing camps it organizes from time to time. The Pentecostal Church also holds annual conventions with divine healing services (see figure 7.1). During October– November 1997, I attended a couple of Revival crusade gatherings in Chumukedima and an evening session at a Pentecostal healing camp at Kohima; I had visited a similar event in November 2006. The two churches I visited in Chumukedima were well attended by both Naga and non-Naga Christians. The first gathering took place in a temporary structure, as the main church was still under construction. A friend from Chumukedima accompanied me and we took seats at the back of the congregation to watch the proceedings. We were given printed handouts of the schedule. One by one, representatives of various churches came to the dais to speak and pray. Some representatives also sang hymns. Due to the mixed gathering, the language used was Nagamese. As there was another Revival gathering taking place a little distance away, we decided to move on to see it. The second gathering was being held at the Police Baptist church located inside the police camp at Chumukedima. Big banners at its entry gates announced the coming of the ‘Revival crusade’. This church had

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 225

mostly Naga in the congregation. It was full, and extra rows of chairs had been arranged outside. The sermon was being given by a Sumi Naga Revival leader, and a closed-circuit camera relayed it on two television sets to those who were sitting outside the church. These crusades also attract Naga and non-Naga Christians from other denominations. Interestingly, although it was a Revival crusade, it was taking place in the premises of the Baptist church. In certain villages the Baptist church does not object to such gatherings.7 The Revival church also organizes special gatherings that culminate in praying for the sick and the laying on of hands. Annual gatherings of such a kind take place in Dimapur town and attract people with chronic or debilitating illnesses. A friend who had worked with the HIV-positive people8 in Dimapur told me that such individuals, irrespective of their religious affiliation, also attend these healing crusades.

A Pentecostal Healing Gathering in Kohima

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A gathering that I could observe at length took place in Kohima in October 1997.9 This was the Pentecostal church’s revival healing camp. Some of the church elders had come from outside Nagaland, from the south Indian state of Kerala. The camp was held at the football ground; a temporary structure had been constructed complete with a wide stage to accommodate the visiting church leaders and the local representatives. Several rows of chairs were

Figure 7.1 A banner at the entrance gate to the local ground in Kohima town inviting everyone to the divine healing services offered by the Pentecostal Church, 2006.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

226 A Matter of Belief

arranged inside the camp. In the space between the rows of chairs and the stage, a thick layer of straw had been spread for people to sit on. Banners had been hung at the entrance to the camp, above the stage and all around on the walls of the camp, inscribed with verses in English from the Bible. The one at the entrance to the hall read: Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise; be thankful, unto Him. And bless His name. Psalm 100:4

The banner on the stage read: When the Lord shall build up Zion, He shall appear in His glory. PSA [sic] 102:16

Some of the other banners had verses that referred to the healing powers of Jesus and concepts of righteousness and sin: The power of the Lord was present to heal them. … call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver thee. Wages of sin is death.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

Luke 5:17 Psalm 50:15 Luke 5:17 I Cor 6:9

On the dais about fifty men and women were sitting separately – women on the right and men on the left. They were all dressed in white: the men wore white shirts over white sarongs, and the women were dressed in white saris. These women were nuns. Known as lie-thou-mia, literally meaning ‘one who prays full-time’, they are said to give up family life and all their property upon becoming a lie-thou-mia and devote themselves solely to worship. I was told that there are about fifty Angami women who have joined the Pentecostal Church as lie-thou-mia. The neighbouring Chakhesang Naga group, among whom the Pentecostal movement is more popular, has about eighty women lie-thou-mia. The men sitting on the dais were mostly pastors from Chakhesang Naga group, besides a few who had come especially from Kerala for this camp. Among the women who were sitting on the dais, some were Naga – Angami and Chakhesang – and the rest were from Kerala. The Revival meeting opened with a small speech by a pastor (from Kerala) in English that was translated verbatim into Angami by a woman. After the introductory speech, some hymns were sung by the congregation ending in a rhythmic chanting of ‘Praise the Lord’, ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Ukepenoupfü’. At this point some of the women sitting on the dais began to shake with jerky movements. All of a sudden one could hear people praying in different languages. Then everybody began to sing aloud and clap hands. At this point the main speaker, a middle-aged pastor from Kerala, started to shake and suddenly switched to speaking in his native language, Malayalam, and then swiftly switched back to speaking in English. Two women translated his sermon

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Church and Healing 227

from English into Nagamese. Meanwhile, some of the people sitting on the stage also began to shake and jerk. This carried on for a short while during which others continued to pray loudly – each in their respective native language – and to clap their hands. In the middle of this, an Angami woman began addressing the congregation, speaking rapidly in a loud voice. This was followed by another speech by one of the pastors. Then three non-Naga women gave their testimonies, describing how they had come to believe in Jesus and had decided to become nuns in the Pentecostal order. These testimonies focused on the misery they were facing and how, through certain miraculous happenings, they felt that the Holy Spirit had guided them. Again, a woman translated all these speeches verbatim from English into Nagamese. The Pentecostal session was held for two days, but I could attend only the first three hours of the session on the first day. The gatherings would begin late in the evening and would go on until about midnight. I was told that these gatherings would eventually culminate in healing through the laying on of hands, for which those who wanted to be healed would go up to the dais to be blessed by the faith healer. According to an informant, who had come from the nearby village of Chiechama to attend the convention, the Pentecostal Church maintains that ‘one’s faith in God should be that which enables one to be healed rather than by taking medicines’, and that therefore followers of the Pentecostal Church hold prayer meetings for the sick. When I asked what happens in the case of serious illnesses or fractures, I was told that they distinguish between more minor illnesses, such as fever and small ailments, that can be cured through prayer and those that are ‘serious’ and require immediate medical attention. In cases of potentially fatal illnesses and fractures, besides praying for the patient they would consult either a medical doctor or a traditional healer. In February 2011, I attended a large prayer gathering on the final day of the three-day healing prayer event in Dimapur (see figure 7.2). The Naga Baptist Church Council had sponsored this event which was led by Paul Dhinakaran, a well-known South Indian charismatic evangelist and founder of Jesus Calls ministry. Crowds in their thousands thronged the venue in the evening for the sermon and communal prayer (one of my companions remarked that there is nothing to do in Dimapur in the evenings and that is why such events are so popular and draw such a large crowd). During the daytime as well as in the evening, several smaller prayer sessions were held inside a hall at the venue by volunteer prayer leaders. The person in charge of the volunteers was also collecting prayer request slips on which the name of the person, the specific reason for prayer and the name of the church to which the person belonged were required. The information was needed, I was told, so that the pastor of the specific church would then be able to check whether a church member’s prayers had been answered. I was told that all over Nagaland the Baptist churches had held a chain of prayers leading to the main event. A twenty-fourhour prayer tower centre has been established in Dimapur where requests for

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

228 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.2 Final evening of the three-day Nagaland Prayer Festival held in Dimapur. It was sponsored by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council and presided over by the South Indian evangelist Paul Dhinakaran. The event was attended by more than ten thousand people, both Naga and non-Naga, and was broadcast live on a Christian TV channel, 2011.

prayers can be made. The Nagaland prayer festival was recorded and broadcast in real time on the special channel of Jesus Calls ministry. The day’s proceedings were also made available on DVD the following day. The three-day meetings were attended by many Naga and non-Naga, some of whom had travelled from the neighbouring state of Assam. On the third day the prayer event ended with healing testimonies given by a handful of people. But some people were critical of the event for not focusing enough on suffering, a particular aspect of theology which the Baptist Church in Nagaland identifies with in relation to the long-drawn nationalist movement and loss of life at the hands of Indian security forces, as well as due to interfactional killings.

A Divided Community Requiring Healing In 2005, Nagaland churches organized a combined church prayer service, for which preachers had even been invited from the United States. Simultaneous prayer sessions were held in churches of different Naga groups in Kohima town. The list of events and services was published in the local newspaper. The night-time service was relayed on a private local television channel which, being available in town, could be watched by those who preferred to stay at home. I watched the event on television. There were extended services, with

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 229

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

devotional songs sung by some popular artists in English. During what seemed like a burst of revival fervour, the camera focused on young men and women, some of who had begun to cry, some were shaking vigorously and a few just fell to the ground. They were then blessed by the person leading the crusade and some were lifted by their companions and made to sit on chairs. In 2006 in Kohima, there was a large three-day gathering of the Pentecostal church in the middle of Kohima town in the football stadium. Banners at the stadium gate stated ‘come and receive joy, peace and healing’ (see figure 7.1). I attended a daytime session and was struck by the ingenuity of simultaneous translations in Nagamese and Tenyidie of the message which was being delivered by a South Indian priest in English. The banners for such religious gathering are displayed on welcome gates, which have the Angami design of stylized crossed wooden buffalo ‘horns’ (kike), that are permanent fixtures installed across Kohima town as well as at the approach to some villages (for example, Khonoma and Chumukidema). In 2006 and 2008 I saw such banners in Tenyidie for the Angami laity, one for a revival prayer hour to raise funds for mission work and the other a call on all Catholics to come to a mass gathering (see figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 A banner in Tenyidie at the welcome gate of Kohima village, inviting everyone to attend the praise and worship service in Tenyidie in aid of mission work at the Nagaland state academy hall in Kohima town, 2006.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

230 A Matter of Belief

Church and Medicine In chapter 5, it was shown that the use of Western medicine, along with reading verses from Scriptures, was a method used frequently by the early medical missionaries in the Naga Hills, with the Catholic missionaries only gaining entry there by virtue of their work in the Kohima Civil Hospital in the 1950s. The first missionaries also opened dispensaries and sold medicines. In one of his letters, Sydney Rivenburg, the medical missionary, had remarked that he had employed one of the evangelists, who had been successful in contacting people, to sell medicine to the villagers at a nominal cost as it would be ‘well for the Nagas to get the notion of buying medicines’ (cited from Rivenburg 1941: 112). Today Baptist and Catholic missions continue to provide medical care, as I now indicate.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Church Dispensary at Kohima Village The medical mission sisters, part of an international Catholic organization, began work in Kohima village in the 1970s in collaboration with the government maternity and child healthcare centre situated in P-khel. For about twenty years they worked at the government dispensary and then opened a separate medical centre near D-khel. The original dispensary has now been taken over by the Baptist church and is used as a primary healthcare centre. The centre is housed in a spacious building, which is also used as residence by the staff. In the centre at a given time there are two or three doctors in residence, most of them from the states of Kerala and Goa. The medical sisters themselves are predominantly from Kerala, a state that has a high number of Catholic Christians. I interviewed one of the sisters, who originally came from Kerala and had spent about three years in Kohima.10 Two of the rooms on the right had been converted into a dispensary. The walls of the rooms were lined with shelves and steel cupboards containing medicines. Besides allopathic medicines and vaccines, the sister told me that they also give Ayurvedic medicine and use ‘pranic’11 methods of healing with ‘magnet-water’ for certain kinds of pain. In addition, they keep ‘Holy oil’, which is available for a small charge. All medicines incur a small fee, usually twenty rupees, although the actual treatment is free. During my visit I saw her give medicine to a few children.12 One case was of a child who had mumps, and the others were medication for intestinal worm infestation. According to the sister, worm infestation is very common and she regularly sells deworming medicines for a nominal charge. Other complaints that generally come to the dispensary include malaria, fever, and burns and cuts that require suturing. The sisters have a basic medical training in nursing. They also go to nearby villages to dispense medicines. Depending on the individual specialization of the sisters, they practice different kinds of alternative therapy.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Church and Healing 231

For example, Sister Alecia, who was posted to Kohima for a year in 2011, uses pranic healing, biochemical therapy, acupuncture (without needle), Ayurvedic and herbal oil preparations, as well as Bach flower therapy for emotional wellbeing. She also uses ‘snake stone’, which she prepares herself from ground cattle bones, to suck out snake poison by placing it on the bite. Snake bites are frequent in Kohima during the cultivation season from June to October. The centre imparts training in primary healthcare to young women from the village. These women are first taught to read and write in English by teachers from the nearby Don Bosco School, and are then trained in healthcare by the sisters. The training is a nine-month certificate programme which includes two months of hospital training and placement. Every year about ten students are trained, most being school dropouts. After training they are sent to other villages to work as primary healthcare workers. The sisters also run a camp and voluntary group called ‘Ray of Hope’ for treating alcoholism among the Naga, which has become a big problem in recent decades and is often blamed on the sociopolitical situation. In Jalukie, Peren district, Father Godfrey Vilasal Thapo, a Chakhesang Catholic priest, is renowned for his herbal medicines and massage cures. He is supposed to have inherited this special ‘gift’ from his mother who was a wellknown herbalist. He grows medicinal plants, and has trained a few individuals in herbal medicine preparation; these medicines are then dispensed from his clinic for a fee. He is helped by medical sisters and assistants, some of whom are ‘traditional masseuses’. He uses massage and herbal remedies, and he prays while treating the patient. His herbal remedies venture is sponsored by the Nagaland government and other funding agencies.13 In Jotsoma village, the Catholic church dispenses medicines for general illnesses like fever, coughs and colds at below-market cost. Once a fortnight, usually on a Sunday, a church elder announces the sale by ringing the church bell, which can be heard clearly in the village. It seems that the dispensaries run by the church fill the gap that is left by the ill-equipped government primary healthcare centres (PHCs) in most Angami villages. Almost all the villages have a PHC, and in some instances a larger healthcare centre may cater to more than one village. For example, the villages of Kigwema, Phesama, Jakhama and Mima are served by a dispensary that is situated between Phesama and Kigwema. The PHCs have a staff of trained auxiliary nurses, a compounder, and a doctor who may visit occasionally. For example, the PHC in Khonoma village, which is situated at the far end of Merhema-khel, has a doctor, a pharmacist, a lady health visitor and three nurses,14 two dai or midwives, two medical attendants, and a chowkidar or peon. Except for three staff members – the doctor who is from Kohima; a nurse who belongs to Jakhama village; and a midwife who is from Jotsoma village – all the other employees at the PHC are from Khonoma village. One of the villagers told me that, although the doctor posted at the PHC is supposed to reside in Khonoma, he only visits the village once a fortnight, as he has a

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

232 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

private clinic in Kohima. The PHC does not have sufficient stocks of medicine.15 The vice-chairman of the village also pointed out that there had been a shortage of medicine in most PHCs in Kohima district. The dispensary deals mostly with cases of injury, skin infection, and worm infection. A look at the entries in the register gives an idea of the illnesses and ailments that are attended to. There are incidences of hypertension, toothache, diarrhoea and stray cases of snakebite and injury while ‘trying to catch a pig’. I was told that the dispensary is primarily used for giving vaccination, treating cuts and injuries that may require suturing, and childbirth. It lacks emergency equipment, so that medical emergencies are taken to Kohima, Dimapur or to Guwahati in Assam at private expense.16 The midwives either call at the house for childbirth or have the woman brought to the dispensary. Khonoma village also has two healers who are considered expert midwives. Most women from the khel where the dispensary is situated, and a few from nearby khel, go to the dispensary for childbirth while the rest are attended to by the traditional midwives. In some PHCs one finds biblical verses that relate to the healing miracles of Jesus, written above the entrance to the consulting rooms. In the PHC situated near Kigwema, the entrance to the nurses and compounder’s room had posters with biblical verses that had been presented to the PHC by the Christian endeavour force and the Christian community of Kigwema. In addition the Nagaland Baptist Church Council also organizes medical camps in different parts of the state. Private medical hospitals bearing biblical names have been built, for example Zion Hospital in Dimapur and Bethesda Hospital in Kohima. The Christian Institute of Health Services and Research Centre (CIHSR) in Dimapur has, since 2007, instituted a public health programme and referral hospital. Some of the doctors at the hospital have joined after spending time as medical missionaries in Nepal and elsewhere, and continue now to teach public health at theological seminaries in Nagaland.

Church Supported Centre for Drug Rehabilitation The problem of drug addiction and alcoholism among the Naga youth is being addressed by some church-backed non-governmental organizations such as the Kripa Foundation, an outfit inspired by Mother Teresa’s work. In 1989 a centre opened in Kohima which takes care of not only those who are addicted, but also the orphans and neglected children of the addicts. The centre’s first director was the pacifist social worker, Niketu Iralu, an Angami (and nephew of Zapu Phizo) from Khonoma village who is also a member of Moral ReArmament (now, Initiative of Change). Another such foundation is the Prodigals Homes in Dimapur which tries to help those who have tested HIV positive and those suffering from AIDS. Otherwise the Baptist church is publicly criticized for its silence on these issues. From 1993 until the present time (2011) the Catholic Church has taken a lead in drug rehabilitation by

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 233

opening a remedial centre at Chumukedima near Dimapur, which is a part of the Development Centre of the Kohima diocese. Significantly it is called Shalom, a name specifically chosen for its meaning of peace. It is funded by various agencies, including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), as well as the Kohima diocese itself.

Faith Healing All the churches in Kohima conduct faith healing services irrespective of denomination. However, the method may differ between the churches. The revival doctrine puts emphasis on prayer and faith for most illnesses, and there are special prayer groups for the sick, as we see below. The pastor of the Revival church listed three different types of healing carried out by the church:

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

(1) Physical: in which one preaches from the Bible. It puts emphasis on the teachings of the Bible and encourages people to have faith in the power of Jesus Christ to alleviate their illnesses and disease. The pastor of the Revival church remarked that ‘if in the Bible people could be raised from the dead then what are these illnesses before such faith!’ (2) Mental healing: where a person is emotionally healed. (3) Spiritual healing: when, after the acceptance of Jesus Christ, a person begins to feel better and feels satisfied with life.

The Baptist Church has a tradition of faith healing that identifies different ways of helping the sick. The foremost is the concept of divine healing in which the illness is cured through the intervention of the Holy Spirit or ‘Kemesa Ruopfü’. Secondly, it is the patient’s own faith in the power of Jesus to heal him/her that helps him to become well. The third way of faith healing is through prayers conducted by the elders of the church, the pastor, assistant pastor, and deacons. Lastly, prayers conducted by those who are attending to the sick may help the person to recover from illness. There are also specialist faith healers who are said to possess a talent for divine healing. I met one such person by the name of Zavihu Keret Angami. Zavihu is a fifty-year-old man, who is an evangelist at the Baptist Revival church at Dimapur and is well known for his gift of the laying on of hands. He is originally from D-khel of Kohima village, where he was the church evangelist at the Revival church. He moved to Dimapur in 1990 when his wife was transferred to the town. He has been practising laying on of hands since 1974, the year he received the gift of healing. He was aged about twenty-seven at the time, and had a vision in which he saw a light akin to a blinding white fire. From that day onwards his touch acquired the power to heal. Zavihu said that it is the Holy Spirit that gives him the confidence to heal others. He is the only person from his family or clan who has this gift.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

234 A Matter of Belief

For ‘laying on of hands’, he places his hands on the sick person. According to him when he touches the patient with his hands, he feels as if energy is flowing out of his hands into the body of the patient. He can himself perceive his patients beginning to feel better from the moment he touches them with his hands. While carrying out the laying on of hands he also reads verses from the Bible, especially Mark 16:17, which refers to driving out the demons from the sufferer’s body.17 Zavihu claims that he has been able to help people who suffer from fever, cancer and dislocation, and those who show symptoms of mental illness, who are known in Angami as kemelo. At the end of my interview (which was conducted with the help of the pastor and another evangelist of the Revival church), Zavihu said that he wanted to bless me. He closed his eyes and spread his arms high while saying the blessing in Angami. While very few people have the gift of ‘laying on of hands’, another form of faith healing is through prayer groups, which are very popular in the Revival churches. Prayer leaders have themselves undergone traumatic episodes. For example a prayer leader I met in February 2011 in Kohima is sought after by Christians, not necessarily from her denomination, to pray for them. They then spend time in their homes in order to overcome illness or other personal conditions. In November 2006, my friend and interpreter told me about what she called a ‘miracle woman’, Savinuo (not her real name), and a curious incident that had happened under a tree in the mountains south-east of Kohima, in which she managed to help a man who had turned into a python from below the waist return to normal human form through prayer. The man’s friends and family had contacted her as a last resort when all else had failed. After a few unsuccessful visits to Savinuo’s house, we finally managed to meet her one day just as she was leaving her house for an errand. She stopped and agreed to spend a few minutes with us when my friend explained that I had been researching on Angami healers. She was very articulate and animate in her description of the event and also talked in detail about how she came to have the gift of revelation/divining and healing. She was originally from Kohima village, but had now moved with her husband to Kohima town. She spoke in the Kohima dialect of Angami and my friend translated for me. Towards the end of the interview she said that she had stopped to speak to us, as my woman friend (with short hair cut) resembled, from a distance, the man referred to above whom she had rescued from that most peculiar situation. The story was narrated by her as follows: The Case of Half Snake Man In March 2003, three men from a Chakhesang Naga area went hunting in the forest. One of them turned into a python under a tree. When I saw the man, he was entwined with the branches of the tree and the top part of the tree was spread over him like an umbrella. On his skin the snake’s scales resembled those of ‘rohu’ fish (Labeo rohita). I placed the Bible on the man’s hands. To get some inspiration to solve

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 235

the situation I fasted for two days during which I visited the affected man and prayed with him. The day after my first visit I went to the place in the morning at around 10 A.M. During my prayers Jesus said to me that the man’s tears should fall on the Bible and told me to chase away any temptations and ask for His blessings (theja) and power (kekuo). I placed my hand on the Bible and prayed continuously. By noon the man gradually began to regain his body and was able to hold the branches of the tree with his hands. I continued to pray and by evening the man slowly turned back fully into human form. During this whole period Ukepenuopfü/God kept giving instructions when to pray and when to stop. As the man began to turn back into human form he checked his fingers and then felt his groin to make sure he had regained his body. All present during this prayed to thank God/Ukepenuopfü and asked Him to bless the place where the incident occurred to stop any recurrence. God revealed to me that it was the snake terhuo-mia that had cursed the man. The man had approached the tree unaware that a male and female snake were mating. In anger the female snake cursed him to become half snake and half man. After the incident I could not sleep for two days and did not even tell my husband what had occurred, and it was the affected man and his friends who told him the story. I am hesitant to make this story public.

But how did she acquire the power to heal? The story is similar to ones narrated by some other diviners. What sets it apart is the vivid details that she remembers and her allusion to the all-encompassing nature of ‘God’.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Case Study of Savinuo When I was about 11–12 years old (about 1976–77), ‘God’ (Ukepenuofü) began talking to me. I then converted to Christianity and joined the revival church of Choto Basti (‘small village’ which is an off shoot of the main Kohima village), but my family was against my decision and would beat me to give up Christianity. In my dreams I saw white (kekra) angels (tei-giliede-mia) and bright light. Once my family beat me up badly and I spent nearly seven days in bed. During this ordeal, one night God sent me an angel who asked me which part of my body was paining. I showed the angel where it hurt me and the angel touched me from head to toe and relieved me of the pain. The angel also told me that it would work with me and talk to me. I recall that in 2005, one day on my way to the Shisha Ho Ho prayer centre (prüzie gei) in Kohima with 4–5 other women, when we passed a bamboo clump a snake wrapped itself around my arm. The other women screamed and ran away, but I began reading from the Bible, Mark 16: 17–18,18 and said ‘Amen, Praise the Lord’. The snake turned into a stick (si). I asked my friends to pick up stones, but only one of them did, while others thought I was going crazy. But God had told me that as soon I threw the stick to the ground it would turn back into a snake. But then I killed and buried it, placing a rock on the spot. Before I devoted myself to praying for others, as a young woman I used to earn money by gathering organic moss manure (seikrünuo) from the forest floor. When I was in the forest between the hills of Phulebadze and Japfü near Kohima, I heard someone say in Angami ‘don’t touch’. I looked all over to see who spoke to me, but I could not see anyone. When I rested my hand on a tree and looked at it I could see

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

236 A Matter of Belief

eyes, nose and a mouth. The tree said to me, ‘why have you stopped doing spiritual work?’ When I stepped on a rock/stone, it told me not to step on it and I stumbled. All the leaves of the holly I had collected to sell in the market turned into mouths. At once all the trees, plants and rocks began talking to me saying ‘don’t touch’. I knelt down (I was wearing a sweater and a skirt), wrapped my scarf around my head and began to pray. God told me that all the beings are talking to me to demand why I had not devoted myself to spiritual work. God asked me to think of my house and as I did, I saw that my daughter was telling a visitor that mother had gone out. God told me that if I went to the forest again to collect moss manure I would be turned into a tree. I used to collect the forest moss manure for growing flowers. After this incident all my plants suddenly died as if to show me the consequence of not listening to the divine command. From 2001 I began helping others.

Savinuo recalled that once a Sumi Naga man came to her to pray for his wife, who suffered from cancer. She prayed and the woman was cured. She once helped a medical doctor who was very ill by advising him what he should eat and praying for him. She also practises massage. Many people come to her. It is difficult to set appointments with people of such repute as they are sought after by those who need help. She is often asked to pray for those who are about to undergo an operation in the hospital, and also to bless expectant mothers.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Prayer Groups Prayer groups are a core feature of the Revival churches. They consist mainly of women but include a few men who conduct special prayers for the sick. Praying in the church and taking the help of a prayer group is very much a part of the healing process. It is said that during these prayer sessions, members of a prayer group are able to see visions and prophesy about future happenings.19 There are prayer houses both within Kohima village and at its outskirts which are available for prayer to anyone, regardless of their church affiliation. There are also other specialist prayer centres, such as those near Medziphema and in Khezakenoma, where families and groups spend a few days in intensive prayer, meditation and introspection. One of the masseuses (a herbalist) I interviewed in 2008, recalled that prior to getting her powers to heal, she had had a spell of illness that lasted a long time, nearly a year. During this period she was advised by the women’s prayer group to fast and pray in the prayer house on the outskirts of Kohima village. She did this for several days, alternating between fasting and praying, sometimes staying back at the prayer house. As advised by the prayer group, she fasted in a particular sequence of seven days, three days and seven days, taking a short break in between. As she got better, she herself developed the power to heal others through prayer and massaging.20 On certain occasions prayer groups may specifically pray to avert a calamity, such as an epidemic or incidents of bloodshed related to the ongoing secessionist movement.21 For these they carry out the fasting and praying sessions known as

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Church and Healing 237

mevo. These are done in relay form – that is to say members of the prayer group take turns to do mevo – each person doing it for a day or two. Women are seen as imparting spirituality to a church through their praying sessions and compassionate work, although Angami Baptist Church Council is yet to ordain any woman as a pastor (Neikhrienyu 2004: 161). In some churches the women’s group meets up for dawn prayer early in the morning once a week. In the villages, women’s groups hold services and prayer meetings in the evenings when they have completed tasks in the fields and their household chores. They ‘faithfully fast and pray for the various needs of the church, nation, community, world’ (ibid.: 162). Prophecy is the mainstay of prayer groups. On occasions prayer groups’ prophecies have revealed the healing powers of certain individuals. Two traditional types of healer I had interviewed – bone setters and herbalists – had told me that their powers of healing were announced by prayer groups in their respective churches. One of them from Kigwema belonged to the Revival church, and the other, from Jotsoma, to the Baptist church. The woman healer from Jotsoma, who had kept her healing talents hidden, was urged to come out and practise her ‘gift’ to heal others, on the basis of repetitive prophecy by the church members during the prayer session. In another case a schoolmaster was told by a visiting delegation of a Revival crusade group that he would come to acquire the talent to heal in some years time. It was several years after this prophecy that he began to practise. The Angami believe that if a person has been given the gift of healing and fails to make use of it then that person may become mentally unstable or kemelo. Incidents were narrated to me of a person being chosen as a shaman but unable to gain the power because of not performing the required rituals, and subsequently going mad (also see chapter 4). An example of how various traditions of healing may be combined in search of a remedy for an illness is seen in the case study of a young woman I call Kevinou. One of my informants, referring to her case, mentioned that he had heard of a young woman thought to be possessed by ‘Satan’. Since he had gone to primary school with the person in question, it was possible for him to approach the family and ask their permission for me to meet the person and interview the family. The Case of Kevinou Kevinou’s family originally hails from Kigwema village. At present the household comprises her mother and two of her unmarried elder sisters. Kevinou is the youngest daughter. Of eight siblings only four sisters are living. The only married sister lives in Phek. They are all Baptists. Since the interview had been fixed, Kevinou’s mother and one of her sisters who works at the hospital were at home. When we reached their house, I could see a young woman peeping out of the kitchen door. My friend told me that the woman I had seen was Kevinou. The kitchen was separate from the rest of the house, which

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

238 A Matter of Belief

had three rooms built in a row. We were ushered into the first room, which had a bed, a bench and some armchairs. The two of us sat down on the chairs, facing the door. Kevinou’s mother and older sister sat on either side and began to talk to us about Kevinou’s illness. In a few minutes Kevinou also came in and stood by the door, looking at my friend and me. She looked unkempt and unwashed. She was wearing a soiled sarong and blouse whose seams from the sides had come off. She had long hair, but in a dishevelled condition and with visible bald patches of alopecia on her head. While I was interviewing the sister and mother she said something to them, and later on my friend told me that Kevinou (who had not recognized my friend – her peer and former schoolmate) had asked whether she should throw stones at us. It was in 1985 that Kevinou began suffering from asthma and recurrent fever. About two years later, in 1987, she suddenly became very temperamental: she would burst into bouts of rage and throw things at people. In 1988–89, the family sought the help of the local healers (daru-kesi-mia) in Chumukedima. They also consulted a person named Thepfumi, who practises traditional medicine and also runs a prayer centre near Dimapur town. It was Thepfumi who told them that Kevinou was under the influence of a terhuo-kesuo, ‘a bad spirit’ (terhuo, ‘spirit’; ke-suo, ‘to be bad’). According to the family, the influence of the bad spirit was also reflected when they took her to the hospital for blood tests in 1992; one part of the blood in the syringe was very clear, but the rest looked ‘dirty’ – thezie-kerhu (literally ‘blood-bad/ dirty’). Later they consulted several medical doctors, but they were unable to improve her condition or behaviour. It became difficult to take her anywhere outside Nagaland, as she would feel breathless when travelling in a vehicle. Once they even brought a doctor from Assam to treat her asthma. Even when she was much younger, when they were in Kohima, she complained of suffocation and of feeling ‘someone pushing her’. She continued to be violent. According to her sister, Kevinou would get her fits of violence at the beginning of the month and then gradually calm down, but would begin to get enraged again towards the end of the month. The cycle continued for some time, during which they tried several kinds of remedy to get rid of the spirit. They called a pastor to perform prayers for her. He sprinkled holy water on her, but it did not help. Instead, whenever he did so, she would become breathless, feel tired and itchy. On the suggestion of friends, during the period 1983 to 1996, they took Kevinou to several prayer groups. The prayer groups were of the Revival Church although Kevinou’s family is Baptist. The prayer groups diagnosed that a ‘big evil spirit’ possessed her and that it had been with Kevinou for so long that it would be extremely difficult to separate it from her. Some identified the spirit as that of a snake – tinyhü ruopfü (literally ‘snake spirit/soul’). It seemed that whenever the spirit visited her, Kevinou behaved differently. At night she would sleep-talk, and when they asked her who she was talking to, she would reply angrily, commanding them to go back to sleep. Kevinou, on the other hand, would always refuse to pray along with the prayer group and would run away whenever they invited her to pray. Her sister said that when she asked Kevinou why she refused to pray with the prayer group, she told her that whenever she tried to pray, a big black shadow would appear near her which

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 239

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

frightened her. The shadow was apparently the terhuo-kesuo, which could be seen only by Kevinou and communicated with her in Angami. When Kevinou’s sister tried to reason with her by asking whether, by not praying along with them, she wanted to go to hell, Kevinou replied ‘I am already in hell’. In 1996, in a Revival prayer meeting, two women from a prayer group in Mao area prophesied that Kevinou’s illness was a consequence of a sin which her greatgrandfather had committed and whose burden had now fallen on her shoulders. Nevertheless, the prayer group suggested that in order to calm Kevinou’s behaviour, the family should undertake mevo – continuous fasting accompanied by recitation of prayers. Since then the family members have been undertaking fasts in turn. During the fasting they recite verses from Mark 16 which emphasize the resurrection of Christ and recount his expelling demons from his disciple, Mary Magdalene. Kevinou’s sister added that normally Baptist Christians do not read these verses, which are read by the Revival Christians, but that they were ready to do anything to cast out the evil spirit troubling Kevinou. I was told that Kevinou’s condition seemed to improve after they had undertaken mevo, reducing the violence for a few months. But whenever they relaxed their fasting and praying, her bouts of violent behaviour resurfaced. The sister added that with a job to attend to it is difficult for them to keep up with the schedule for continuous praying. Since they began consulting the prayer groups, Kevinou has stopped going out and stays within the house compound. At one point her family members recounted that when Kevinou was a teenager and living with her sister in Phek, she received the ‘calling’ in the form of ‘speaking in tongues’. According to them, she could have utilized this gift to prophesy, but failed to do so. They were implicitly suggesting that, had she utilized this ‘gift’, she might not have come under the influence of the bad spirits. Interestingly, they were referring to the traditional concept of natsei (see chapter 2), that occurs when a person is unable to accept or use the divine ‘gift’ bestowed on them (or due to improper ritual performance) and as a result apparently becomes deranged or kemelo.

This case shows how different methods of healing are tried by the family and how the explanations for Kevinou’s illness combine the traditional with the Christian, or, more specifically, point up an interesting example of the use of common beliefs in the creation of medical and religious pluralism. Although possession by a bad spirit is recognized as the root cause of the illness, two separate reasons are given to explain why the possession took place. One prayer group divined the illness as the result of a sin committed by an ancestor, while the family itself implicitly portrayed the illness as resulting from natsei. In other words, Kevinou’s inability to do something about the ‘gift’ that was bestowed on her in the form of speaking in tongues as a child had led to her present condition. Finally, by way of illustrating the similarity as well as diversity of beliefs and practices, the theme of an ancestor’s sin resulting in illness is common to both traditional and Christian sickness aetiology (see chapter 2).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

240 A Matter of Belief

The combined medical and religious pluralism, as described in this chapter, comes, then, from addressing illness through prayer groups, faith healing, the laying on of hands, and spirit and ancestral innovation, alongside the use of allopathic medicines. The next section will show how it also becomes the basis of a collective Naga concern to address more widely the demoralization that has occurred in the last decade through a seemingly unstoppable continuation from previous years of the killings by opposed members of the separatist movements. It is as if much of the earlier hostility directed at the Indian Army and Government has been turned in on Naga themselves, along the lines of the factions. From my strong personal impressions over the years, and by comparing accounts given by individual Naga, I have little doubt that the despair and demoralization felt by Naga has grown since the beginning of the millennium. For some people, even the church itself is viewed with disappointment in its evident failure to stop the warring factions. As if in response, the church, in the Christian idiom of healing humanity’s and hence society’s ills, draws on the collective Naga understanding and experience of traditional and modern cure, and tries to reverse this loss of Christian confidence by seeking to reconcile the factions.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Healing the Community/Nation The current Naga demoralization is fuelled by more than the interminable violence between separatist factions. For, coinciding and causally linked to living in such violent uncertainty, people have taken to drug abuse and alcoholism, while employment has been badly hit by the effects of the struggle, with Indian government aid often viewed as sustaining unproductive dependency. Healing festivals and church-sponsored gatherings have become a way of addressing these problems which are clearly those of individual bodies as well as society. It is noticeable that those gatherings occurring at the end of the first decade of the millennium, the most recent at the time of writing, continue the global outreach but show much more interdenominational collaboration than in previous decades, as Naga increasingly bemoan their situation and criticize the church as a whole. The gatherings may either be explicitly evangelical or consist of other activities, like ‘healing’ football matches, still organized by the church, as the following two examples illustrate. The Dimapur Football Match On 9 October 2008, a friendly football match was played between two teams, ‘Team Hope’ made up of players from rival Naga nationalist groups,22 and ‘Team Faith’ consisting of members from Naga civil society in Dimapur, Nagaland (including Reverend Wati Aier, Chairman of Nagaland Baptist

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 241

Church Council, Reverend Zhabu Terhüja of Nagaland Christian Forum, and four other church leaders). It was Reverend Zhabu Terhüja who stressed the need to forgive and forget, saying, ‘This is a Spiritual Approach to repent and return to God’, and there was certainly a stated need on the part of Naga to seek a collective attempt to rebuild a mutually beneficial and cooperative civil society, and to reconcile violent divisiveness. The match was organized by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) and was indeed hailed as a pioneering attempt to bring unity between the warring factions and reconciliation between the victims of violence – the widows and orphans – and the perpetrators of violence, the so-called Naga ‘national workers’. The widows and orphans presented a white rose each to the Naga nationalists from different factions who had agreed to play the game.23 Before the commencement of the match, the Nagaland Christian Forum organized a sequence of events beginning with a presentation by children, a mass prayer, releasing white balloons by members of the Naga Mothers’ Association, reading passages from the Bible, and singing Christian hymns by a choir made up of both young and old Naga. This was the first public attempt in Nagaland to ‘heal the wounds’ of the community by bringing together leaders of the nationalist underground factions and of civil society. A newspaper reported that religious leaders hoped that the soccer match would lead to ‘spiritual’ unity. Two previous soccer matches had been organized in Chiang Mai, Thailand and in Kohima, Nagaland. But the Dimapur soccer match of October 2008 received large publicity after the underground leaders agreed to suspend hostilities between them for fortyeight hours and went to the venue unarmed.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Kohima Healing Festival At the Kohima local ground in September 2009, a mass ‘healing festival’ was organized by the ongoing Kohima Healing Festival (KHF) on the explicitly Christian theme, ‘I am the Lord, who heals you’, drawn from Exodus 15:26. The event was heavily attended, with newspaper reports claiming ‘thousands of people’ of whom ‘many were healed and dedicated their lives to God’. Among other international participants, the gathering included the Reverend Tom Elie, an evangelist, songwriter, worship leader and president of the American Oasis World Ministries, on whose website was a description and several photos of the congregation.24 Reverend Elie spoke of heaven and hell as the only two choices open to people, with no middle way, to be reached through the three essentials of daily Bible reading, praying, and attending a Bible-based church. The healing festival also included the participation of Revival and Baptist churches, and a three-day leaders’ seminar held at the Assemblies of God church in Kohima town. It was in fact on the third day that many of the congregation dedicated their lives to God after being healed. In addition to this congregational act, a prayer cell was available for anyone in

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

242 A Matter of Belief

need of personal prayer. A special collective prayer for youth was offered. Pastors and reverends from various churches were there. The diversity of involvement of personnel and sects is evident in that a number of Revival, Baptist and other Christian organizations variously sang, prayed, and gave scriptural readings. These included the Nagaland Christian Revival Church, Chakhesang Baptist Church, Central Baptist Church, Kohima Bible College, First Assembly of God Church, Shalom Biblical Seminary, Bethel Church, Joyous Messengers and the God Strain Group. The importance of the occasion was further underlined by the attendance of Shurhozelie Liezietsu, the Nagaland Government Minister for Urban Development and Higher Education, an elderly Angami Naga.25 These and other large-scale gatherings aim to proclaim peace primarily between the three major nationalist factions, but violence is in fact more fundamentally and historically rooted in the organization of rival and competing families and clans. At this village level of ongoing factionalism, church and community leaders have for some time sought to reconcile violent conflict between clans in an attempt to secure the basis of a national healing process. Efforts were first aimed at clans that had been in strife for over half a century, dating at least from the torture and brutal murder in 1956 of Theyiechüthie Sakhrie (or T. Sakhrie), allegedly for his moderate views which did not support violent armed resistance or the demand of sovereignty, but proposed instead autonomy within the Indian Union. The assassination was allegedly on the orders of the Naga National Council (NNC) leader, Zapu Phizo Angami. Sakhrie had been the right-hand man of Phizo until their fallout, but was labelled a traitor.26 Sakhrie was secretary of the NNC that spearheaded the Naga separatist movement. Sakhrie belonged to Lievüse clan and Phizo hailed from another clan, Dolie, of Merhema-khel. It took several years of negotiation efforts by a special peace committee, Khonoma Public Commission (KPC), comprising some eminent Khonoma villagers, to bring reconciliation between the members of the two clans. KPC was formed by the Khonoma Rüffüno village council, which oversees social and cultural aspects of the village. Niketu Iralu, a prominent Angami peace activist as well as a nephew of Zapu Phizo, recollected the enormous task he faced in getting the two clans to agree to resolve the decades old ‘blood feud’.27 Many other killings had also taken place and the task was to begin the reconciliatory process among all other families before addressing the specific Phizo and Sakhrie issue. For this, drawing on the Angami custom of penyü, a day was set for self reflection. On the selected day, in the morning, the whole village came to a standstill and all kept silent for three minutes. No sound was heard. Iralu commented that the silence was almost akin to experiencing ‘god’ on earth – according to him even the animals stopped making noise. Sanyü (2010) writes that some villagers kept the penyü by fasting while others distributed food to neighbours and poor villagers. What followed in the form of peace talks and processes was the enactment of the older custom of making a truce or vitho

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 243

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

(making things ‘good’ or better) between the warring sides, and bringing about kezikevi (friendship and peace).28 The spirit of reconciliation drew upon the traditional concepts and practice of kethezie-kedzünya or self retrospection, and of mhosho, that is to say keeping one’s own or clans’ honour to do the right thing (Sanyü 2010; and Chasie 1999: 108). After several such meetings the issue was finally resolved between the two clans. In November 2006, a large gathering of all the clans from Merhema-khel of Khonoma village and the representatives of civil societies was held to commemorate fifty years of T. Sakhrie’s death (see figure 7.4). The occasion highlighted the reconciliation between the clans of Sakhrie (Lievüse) and Phizo (Dolie). The Lievüse clan erected a commemorative monolith in the memory of Sakhrie, and an elder of Dolie clan apologized to the Sakhrie’s clan for the assassination. But if reconciliation could be creditably achieved at this level through the apologies of a clan elder, it has not been secured at the national level, either through personal apologies or through the ministry of the church, despite the

Figure 7.4 A gathering of all the clans from Merhema-khel of Khonoma village and the representatives of civil societies to commemorate fifty years of T. Sakhrie’s death. The unveiling of a memorial monolith was followed by a communal feast, 2006.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

244 A Matter of Belief

continuation of dialogue and the organization of large-scale healing gatherings by Christian churches since the ‘historic’ football match in Dimapur. Increasingly dismayed with the violent discord between the nationalist factions and with no solution of a united nationalist group in sight, ordinary people did however, turn to the church, especially the dominant Baptist church, to bring a solution through reconciliation.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. For some comparable case studies from other parts of the world see Allister 1981; Ness 1980; Peacock 1984. 2. The peace team consisted of three neutral observers, one of whom was Reverend Michael Scott of the Anglican Church of the U.K., who had helped Zapu Phizo to get asylum in the U.K. For first hand impressions of the talk, see Gundevia 1975. The peace talks were brought about by the concerted efforts of Reverend Longri Ao, who was able to communicate with the representatives of both the Indian government and the Naga nationalists (Rao 1986). 3. A similar undertaking was sought at the ‘125 years of Christianity’ celebration in Kohima in November 1997. After months of intrafactional killings, a week’s ceasefire was observed by the two NSCN factions to allow the celebrations to proceed smoothly. 4. Despite this reassurance, three days before the crusade the Naga nationalists ambushed an Indian military convoy, killing 4 people and injuring several others. There were other minor shooting incidents around Kohima, but the crusade carried on (Rao 1986: 111–12). 5. They were being destroyed as late as 1996 in some Konyak villages, including those I had seen in 1991 at the chief’s house in Chui village. 6. In my conversations in September 2010 with Reverend Ben Wati, former chairman of the World Evangelical Fellowship, who was present as a preacher during this revival, he insisted that the sick were indeed healed, and that the people to whom he was preaching said that they saw the hand of God above his head and glow behind him (see also Luen 2010). 7. Rao mentions that some churches in Nagaland have marked a certain day and time of the week for what is called by them a ‘Revival hour’, ‘where they can open up freely for emotional outbursts of singing, dancing, mass prayer, etc.’ (1994: 40). 8. A Baptist Christian organization called the Prodigal Sons has been foremost in pioneering the rehabilitation programme for the IV drug users and those who have tested positive for HIV. Billboards with slogans on AIDS awareness are prominently displayed in Kohima and Dimapur. I had also seen similar slogans in the villages in the mid-1990s. 9. I attended another large Pentecostal gathering in November 2006 in Kohima town. 10. The middle-aged sister was wearing a sari and she explained to me that they should ideally be wearing their habits, but at the dispensary in Kohima their dress did not matter. They wear the habit only when they go to the village and the church. The sister had served at a mission centre in Madhya Pradesh as well. She talked to me about their work in other states, and repeatedly commented on the Hindu caste system during the interview. 11. Pranic healing is a system of natural healing techniques that utilizes prana¯ (Sanskrit term meaning ‘life-force’) or the body’s energy to treat various illnesses. 12. I saw the nurse give a Dispirin (an analgesic) tablet to a child who was less than three years old, and was surprised that the centre did not have paracetamol syrup, which is generally given to small children for treating fever. 13. He was sent by the Kohima diocese for more training in holistic methods (to add to his traditional ‘Naga’ medicinal skills) to the Medical Mission Sisters, but according to a newspaper interview, he already knew these methods and hence concentrated on skills from Chinese and

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Church and Healing 245

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

Japanese medicine, and yoga. Apparently, he does not get financial help from the Kohima diocese because of his ‘individualistic way of making decisions (kedopo)’. It was explained in a personal communication with another Catholic priest in Kohima that Father Godfrey does not like to go though the bureaucratic procedure for applying for funds at the diocese. For a detailed report of his practice, see www.religiousindia.org/2009/09/23/priest-with-healinghands-combines-massage-prayer, retrieved 15 September 2011. The nurses get their training at a nursing college in Mokokchung, but may undertake a further training period of six months to qualify as a lady health visitor; the midwives and medical attendants are trained at Kohima. There were several sachets of oral rehydration salt, whose use-by date had expired, lying in a trough in the medical attendant’s room. See Chinai (2004) for a report on the lack of basic emergency healthcare for women in rural Nagaland. Mark 16:17 ‘And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues’ (King James Version). Mark 16: 17–18. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (King James Version). Linyü, writing about revival/conversion movements in Nagaland says that, ‘not only congregational meetings, but even individuals with no formal education whatsoever, through their prayers and fasting would start claiming to receive special messages … Indeed many of this kind of individuals who went underground to join the Naga Army were said to have led Naga away from dangers, traps set by the Indian Army, and thus saving the Nagas’ (Linyü 2004: 136–70). In a book on the Ao Naga religion, Panger, himself an Ao Naga, comments that, with the coming of the Revival movement among the Ao, ‘in church circles a good number of believers claim to have received gifts of the Holy Spirit, specially during revival movements … they prophesise, dream, see visions, read minds of others, heal diseases … go into trance and even claim to know what goes on in distant places.’ He then goes on to equate those who prophesy in Revival Church with the traditional concept of tiger-man and shaman, saying ‘the only difference is that the former (tiger-man/shaman) is attributed to the devil and the latter to the gift of the Holy Spirit’ (Panger 1993: 73). In January 2008, a Kohima village sports meet was held at the stadium in Kohima town. Football and wrestling are two popular sports among villagers. At the time many masseurs were present at the stadium to cater to their regular clients, a number of whom play competitive sports. At one such prayer meeting in Kohima in 1997, at the time of my fieldwork visit, it was claimed that a woman member had seen visions of heavy bloodshed. This was thought to portend an escalation of violence in the ongoing interfactional fighting between two groups of the secessionist underground Naga rebels. I was told that special prayer meetings had been held to pray for peace in the region, and to avert any more bloodshed and consequent action by the Indian armed forces. In 2006, the prayer groups prophesied that there might be an earthquake in the region, as Nagaland is on the seismic zone. NSCN (IM), NSCN/GPRN, FGN and PSG (People Support Group). Kazu Ahmed, formerly of PANOS India, made a short film on the reconciliation football match held in October 2008 in Dimapur, which was premiered in January 2009 at the Museum der Kulturen Basel during the exhibition ‘Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Remembered’, curated by Richard Kunz and myself. http://oasiswm.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html, retrieved 25 July 2010. www.nagalandpage.co.in/local.html, retrieved 28 September 2009. See also: www.unpo.org for news on the event; and a write-up by Sanjoy Hazarika at www. hardnewsmedia.com/2007/10/1348, both retrieved 10 June 2010. For detailed information on T. Sakhrie, see Sakhrie 2006; Nibedan 1978: 56–72; and Lotha 2009.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

246 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

27. I interviewed Niketu Iralu on 17 February 2011 at Sechü Zubza on the outskirts of Kohima. Visier Sanyü, who also belongs to Merhema-khel in Khonoma, kindly shared his unpublished article (Sanyü 2010) on the reconciliation process which provided the information on the traditional Angami method of conflict resolution. 28. Alemrenba (2004) writes about similar methods of reconciliation among the Ao Naga known as chiyongsem, or the act of ‘eating together’, which is ‘characterized by (the) spirit of repentance, forgiveness, acceptance, and submission to each other’ (ibid.: 48–50). He explains the process by citing the case study of reconciliation between Changtongya (an Ao village) and Yachem (a Phom village), which was brought about by the concerted efforts of elders from the two villages with the help of the Baptist church in November 1989. The two villages observed ainkishi, or cloistering, and performed aksü, i.e. the killing of a pig for the combined feast. During this period the members of the Baptist churches from both villages conducted ‘Bible study, fasting and prayers, counselling, and revival camps’ (ibid.: 90). Changtongya village gave the feast in 1989 which was reciprocated by Yachem in 1990 (ibid.: 91).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

CONCLUSION

This book has focused on the Angami Naga through the ‘looking glass’ of religion and healing, and the long journey from animism to Christianity. It began with religious strife in the light of diversity, and now ends by describing a turmoil in which people seek refuge in healers and look to the church to bring a long-lasting peace that would heal the community of the violence inflicted on it by outsiders, as well as by its own people.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Diversity above Difference In pointing up the struggle between acceptance, rejection, or Christian accommodation of traditional healing methods, the narratives of sickness and their treatment by Christian and non-Christian healers reveal the contours and trace the choices made by healers. There is the division between those who remain committed to the animistic mode of healing, which is a way of expressing fundamental indigeneity, and those who adopted the Christian ‘healing spirit’. It is a division that then becomes complicated by the nationalist movement itself heavily adopting Christianity as its justification for autonomy or sovereignty from a mainly non-Christian India. At its beginning the movement was expressed more as a nationalist than a religious cause, and both Christians and followers of the animistic religion supported it. Animist healers formerly lived with and healed members of the ‘underground’ in the jungle. Alongside increasing political expression through Christianity, there is now a pluralistic medico-religious system which shows overlap in methods as between church and non-church, as healers using Naga spirits in their practice become accepted by the church, and they and non-church healers also adopt techniques and materials of biomedicine. There is every sign that this medicoreligious pluralism will become even more diverse as the future unfolds, for there is no significant objection to it and indeed a general welcoming of the increase in therapeutic options that it entails. In the field of the medicoreligious, in other words, there has been a gradual reconciliation of differences which seems likely to remain, and is indeed reflected globally in the increasing

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

248 A Matter of Belief

tendency to use, accord legitimacy to, and combine the use of several medical traditions, including biomedicine. Different medical and religious systems cannot easily be compared with violently competing nationalist factions in the search for reconciliation. It is significant however that the Naga nationalist movement has indeed moved behind the banner of prominently protestant Christianity in legitimating its aims. The suppression of moderate nationalists by the more fundamentalist in their aim for sovereignty in some ways has the resonance of Christianity becoming the sole religion of the Naga for nationalists, undermining the animist religion.1 The movement remains opposed on the issue of autonomy versus complete independence from India and yet agrees on the need to distance the Naga from mainstream India and to further foster Naga cultural distinctiveness as a whole. The idea of a Greater Nagaland or Nagalim may be an aim too far. But, if the template of plural medico-religious healing were to be used as a basis for reconciling intra-Naga nationalist strife, it would outline a sociocultural, political and linguistic plurality of Naga, which is generally Christian but with internal denominational differences. In the case of Naga, medico-religious diversity appears similarly to be triumphing over previously demarcated practices, while the diversity of views in the nationalist movement could only be celebrated if a formula combining autonomy and sovereignty could be found. For instance, an independent polity of culturally and linguistically similar peoples of north-east India (e.g. Naga, Mizo, et al.) could include Naga autonomy within this greater sovereignty. But little interest has been shown in this possibility which would not anyway satisfy those seeking to create Nagalim. An attempt was made in what was hailed as the ‘federal model’ of Nagaland governance, but this has not been explained publicly and doing so might lead to the questioning of the present leadership of the NSCN (IM) that has taken upon itself to negotiate on behalf of all Naga people without the consent of other factions. A recent Ph.D. thesis went on to suggest that the new government for an independent Naga nation could be based on the present organizational set-up of the Naga Baptist Church Council, in which each church has proportional representation and the leadership is elected by the representational council.2 But such a model might result in demographic hegemony which is already feared by the smaller Naga groups and is also reflected in the present competition between the different nationalist factions. Large-scale religious gatherings do more than reactivate collective enthusiasm. They also become vehicles of other messages, not always religious. The visit to Nagaland in 1972 of the world-famous American evangelist, Billy Graham, represented a hiatus in hostile relations between Naga nationalists and the Indian Army and Government. The nationalists promised a ceasefire in return for the evangelist being allowed to preach among the Naga, to which the Indian Government agreed, even though this was a time when hostilities between them and the Naga were fierce. A similar undertaking was sought at

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion 249

the ‘125 years of Christianity’ celebration in Kohima in November 1997. After months of intrafactional killings, a week’s ceasefire was observed by the two factions of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Nagalim, since 1999) to allow the celebrations to proceed smoothly.3 The visit to north-east India of Pope John Paul in 1986 was another very high point in a trajectory of increasing international recognition of the extensiveness and depth of Christianity in the region, Catholic as well as Baptist, Revival and Pentecostal. Although exceptional large-scale occasions, these were events which had a family resemblance in their communal effervescence to the more regularly occurring healing camps and healing festivals described in chapter 7. These latter, too, extend the notion of healing beyond the immediate woes of individuals to society as a whole. Indeed, it can be argued that they can be paired with other collective events, such as reconciliatory ‘friendly’ sports competitions between normally ruthless combatants, as also described in chapter 7, which, while not manifestly religious, are set up by Christians to achieve similar aims of healing intrasocial conflict through reconciliation between the families of the victims and the perpetrators of the intra-Naga political killings. Taking a moral stand, some Naga joined the international Moral Re-Armament movement (now known as Initiatives of Change) to bring reconciliation and healing at the level of the family first. Introspection by the church leaders of their role in Naga society began as the factional fighting increased between Naga nationalists. Two years before the 125-year celebration of Naga Christianity by the Baptist church and the ceasefire declaration between Indian security forces and one of the factions of Naga nationalists, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland/Nagalim (led by Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah), political and church leaders met for a convocation titled ‘Crusade on Naga Morality’. The opening statement by an Angami elder, Shürhozolie, framed the agenda: ‘How can the Church make the people appreciate the inherent riches and value of life and thereby correct the ills of our [Naga] society?’ (1996: 4). K. Terhüja (1996), a female lay leader, was more straightforward in pointing to the silence of church leaders and ordained ministers in the face of the oppressive situation that the Naga were facing. Since the death in 1981 of Longri Ao, the charismatic Ao Naga evangelical leader of the Nagaland Baptist Church Council, and the failure of two peace accords between the Indian Government and the Naga nationalists in 1964 and 1975, the church withdrew from political negotiations concerning the Naga nationalist movement, at the behest of the Naga Baptist Church. It is ironic that supposedly secular Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, had thought of Christianity and the British colonial administration as having encouraged the Naga to think of seceding from India. In a letter in 1952 he wrote that ‘As Indian independence gradually approached, some of the British officers and Christian Missionaries induced them [the Naga] to think in terms of “Naga Independence”’.4 Christianity did not in the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

250 A Matter of Belief

event provide an adequate base for securing Naga independence, and in fact in due course became a kind of last resort for trying to settle discord among Naga, some of whom did wish for independence and others for no more than autonomy. As internal Naga differences worsened, internationally linked Christian organizations involved themselves ever more. At the instance of Baptist Church leaders of North America, the celebration of the 125th year of Christianity in Nagaland was organized in Atlanta in July–August 1997. The American Baptist International Ministry had been working with the Naga for over a decade. Dan Buttery and John Sundquist of International Ministries, who had purportedly trained Naga in peace negotiation skills, participated along with Reverend Wati Aier5 in the Baptist Peace Fellowship talks to bring about reconciliation among the warring Naga factions. All the insurgent factions were cordially invited for the same in an attempt to unite the rebels, but one faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland/Nagalim, led by Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah, boycotted the talks.6 The Hong Kong-based Christian Conference of Asia and the Geneva-based World Council of Churches have also been contributing to keeping the Naga issue alive. It was alleged that the Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC) and the Council of Naga Baptist Churches (CNBC) receive considerable foreign donations. Kredda, a Dutch nongovernmental organization and the British-based Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, have shown a keen interest in the current reconciliation movement in Nagaland, and their representatives regularly visit the state. Despite such setbacks, religious organizations have remained part of negotiations from the beginning of the peace process.

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Reconciliation: The Way to Community Healing Just five days before Christmas in 2001, the Naga Reconciliation movement was launched in Kohima. In addition to the church, the various Naga councils also participated. Under the aegis of Naga Hoho (council), the Naga had made a historical move on Naga Reconciliation, which was officially launched at the Kohima local ground. The ceremony was well represented by many influential Naga leaders, irrespective of political affiliation or tribe. The Naga from all over Naga-inhabited areas participated and declared their commitment to ‘peace, unity and reconciliation’. The Declaration at the ceremony stated that ‘those who represent the Naga must be willing to listen to the voices of the Naga people’. It was represented by the village councils, the regional bodies and the tribes’ Hoho (council), besides the churches and civic organizations. At the Naga Peace Convention, 22–24 February 2006, the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) was formed under the guidance of Reverend Wati Aier, of the Naga Baptist Church Council, purportedly based on the historical and political right of the Naga to a peaceful political settlement with India. A

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion 251

commitment to the reconciliation of Naga through a consistent Christian message was also declared. The infighting between ‘Christian brothers’ and the subsequent loss of life, as well as an urgency to unite all the Naga factions to form a unified platform, were the key reasons behind this move by Naga civil societies such as Naga Hoho, Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA), Naga Peoples’ Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR), Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC), Naga Students’ Federation (NSF), Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) and other organizations. Later that year, on 29 September 2006, the NBCC organized the Healing and Reconciliation Movement and offered prayers of peace at Covenant Hall, Dimapur. It was organized with a vision of generating consciousness and conversation on the Naga struggle among different sections of society and of bringing about citizen-participation in the process of reconciliation. In July 2009 a programme to ‘Restore Nagaland through Christ’ was launched, and appeals were made to the public to reclaim the Christian way of living. Apart from leaders of the various churches the main speaker was a government official (district commissioner) who made this appeal. In a seminar on ‘peace capacity-building training’ organized by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council in 2009, a young peace studies scholar, Longchar, suggested that the 1,356 Naga churches could use their pulpits to address the collective Naga issue, and then it might alleviate the sense of powerlessness that is at present felt by the ordinary Naga people.7 We see from these various events that a collective Christian message of peace and healing is increasingly invoked as, at the same time, the church incorporates the community in the idiom of its initial message of individual salvation and individual healing. Although the Naga nationalist movement for independence from India began nearly six decades ago, it has almost throughout been subject to fissiparous tendencies, with many Naga deaths resulting from the fighting between the three nationalist factions. Since 1993, however, the Naga national movement has embraced the slogan ‘Nagaland for Christ’ and has begun to represent its struggles for sovereignty or autonomy as a struggle of a Christian people. This self imagery is furthered by international evangelistic groups who reemphasize the Christian aspect of the Naga struggle, as Nehru had indeed anticipated. The appeal to Christianity made by the nationalist fighters is therefore also made by those who oppose their violence. Large-scale appeals for reconciliation have been made by the largely Christian-based civilian organizations that have come together to form the Forum for Reconciliation between the various Naga nationalist factions. The forum derives the theme and some of its inspiration from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa in its hope to reconcile not just the various nationalist factions but also the families of Naga victims. Reflecting this inspiration, the mass gatherings which are organized to heal the conflict-torn community express an ideology based on the Christian theological notion of forgiveness. Since the Naga nationalists adopted the motto ‘Nagaland for Christ’, increasingly the Christian theme is also being invoked by the civil

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

252 A Matter of Belief

societies to bring in an atmosphere of peace to Nagaland. The expectation is that, through prayer, combative Naga nationalists and lay people will both forgive and ask for forgiveness. In this effort the Forum for Naga Reconciliation is helped by international faith organizations working in the field of peace negotiation – the Quakers from Britain and International Ministries from the United States. Members of the Quaker Friends of Peace have been helping the Naga since the 1960s. In 2008 they were part of the negotiations in Chiang Mai which led to the first football match between nationalists (United Nationals) and the Naga civil society (Naga Parliament). The renaming of the teams as ‘Team Hope’ and ‘Team Faith’ at the football match in Kohima in October 2008 was taken by many as reflecting a positive outlook for the Christian basis of the reconciliation talks. Later, in a news report on the Forum for Naga Reconciliation in Manipur online (30 January 2010), it was insistently asserted that there could be ‘no turning back from reconciliation’. How much are such hopes and prospective confidence justified? Parallel with the wish on the part of many Naga that, in the absence of other possibilities, the church should be the agent of reconciliation, there is the expressed frustration that the church is not in fact succeeding in its attempts so far, and that obstacles need to be removed or other acts put in place before reconciliation can be broached. There are those Naga who point to the fact that, despite the rhetoric surrounding the need to forgive and forget, there are few expressions of apology or regret on the part of the alleged perpetrators of the rival factional killings. When offered, however, they appear to many to be effective, as in the case of the Dolie clan elder’s apology for the death of Sakhrie, described in chapter 7, despite taking years to be made. Other instances are sometimes given, but, overall, apologies are conspicuous by their absence. The question of the prior need for apology before there can be reconciliation touches on one of the many complications surrounding the possibility of forgiveness. Can one forgive, let along forget, that which has not been fully, publicly and properly acknowledged as an apology? When possible forgiveness is cast in Christian terms, this concern points up the difficulties of trying to base political settlement on religious theodicy.8 An Angami Naga scholar (Kethoser Kevichusa) embeds his own experiences of the loss of family members at the hands of violently opposed nationalists, linking them to the violence inflicted with impunity by the Indian Army (under the 1958 Armed Forces Special Powers Act) and the lack of retribution on the part of the victims and of justice for them. He asks what forgiveness really means in the absence of justice and reconciliation, and explores the extent to which vengeance occurs when an ‘elemental’ thirst for justice is denied, so precluding the possibility of forgiveness. He concludes by pointing out that, theologically, the Christian position must be to forgive without any preconditions such as justice, atonement or apology, while recognizing that this manifestly has not (yet) happened in Nagaland, despite the adoption of the nationalist slogan and motto, ‘Nagaland for Christ’. Yet, as he points out, for

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion 253

Christianity vengeance is morally inadmissible and also counterproductive, setting up an unending cycle of vengeful killings. Following the logic of this claim, the church would then be entitled to follow the Christian ethos of forgiveness, without such preconditions as apology, as a way of reaching reconciliation, and that is indeed implied in the healing appeals made by the church and its clergy at Naga gatherings and in families. Yet, given the evidence from the few cases in Nagaland where apologies, implicitly seeking a kind of forgiveness, have brought about family or clan reconciliation, a church strategy might be to focus on eliciting apology as the precondition. It is sometimes observed that the South African truth and reconciliation campaign had relative success because it did seek admission or confession of wrongdoing and apology, while, to make another comparison, that of Chile did not (see Amstutze 2005).9 Murray Last describes the process of reconciliation in Nigeria in the wake of the Nigeria–Biafra civil war in the late 1960s. He asks whether reconciliation can ever be possible unless there is public acknowledgement that the killings and atrocities were ‘fundamentally evil’. This is the route taken by the formal truth and reconciliation campaigns, and borders on the demand for apology. But Last also touches on another understanding of the problem. He argues that ‘the greatest obstacle to reconciliation has been the persistence of competing myths about what actually happened’ (Last 2000: 327). False casualty figures are presented, atrocities invented or exaggerated, the enemy depicted as inhumane or irresponsibly dangerous, and so on. Here, in the case of the Nigerian civil war, we have not just the absence of apologies and confessions, nor an unsatisfied desire to see the perpetrators of violence punished, nor even for unconditional Christian forgiveness to prevail. But, instead, there is recognition that false information is being disseminated. Given that Christianity among Naga is the one ideological system now fervently shared by both nationalists and most ordinary people, an option is for the church to acknowledge the diversity of false information and to present instead an accurate commentary and history before calls for forgiveness, or at least to see these as the precondition of the forgiveness that might lead to reconciliation.

Vengeance as an Obstacle to Reconciliation The circumstances in the three cases, South Africa, Chile and Nagaland, are admittedly quite different, with division in the first case broadly along the lines of race, with that of Chile based on support for or opposition to the former dictator, Pinochet, and with Naga shifting from violent conflict with India to violence among themselves. And, while the South African (Shore 2009: 59–74) and Naga cases draw upon Christian ideas of healing and reconciliation, that of Chile does not on the whole. But in all cases the spectre of uncontrollable vengeance looms large and is a pivot around which argument and affiliations

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

254 A Matter of Belief

revolve. And in the Naga case, it is recurring acts of vengeance killings between the nationalist factions, and between people and clans in the name of such factions, that are the fundamental obstacle to any discourse that might lead from apology to forgiveness and reconciliation. It is commonly recognized that, without an agreed and total suspension of the vengeance killings, the church cannot seek the apologies that would point to reconciliation. But the cycle is not easily broken. The anthropological literature on vengeance, especially when associated with the feud or similar organization, is considerable. Two views of vengeance can be discerned, with one being more typical of an earlier anthropology than the other. On the one hand are classical expressions such as Gluckman’s ‘the peace in the feud’ and Evans-Pritchard’s ‘ordered anarchy’, putting the view that conflicts which are cross-cutting tend to neutralize each other, as when an enemy clan that takes one’s sisters in marriage thereafter becomes an affine, or that a system of checks and balances emerges from a pyramidal segmentary lineage organization. Both anthropologists view the feud as a system of rights and moral rules. Gluckman for instance (1963: 59) supports Evans-Pritchard’s interpretation of the feud among Nuer as providing social and moral order insofar as a kinsman will not be supported in reciprocal acts of vengeance if he is judged to have acted wrongly. Although generally rejected by anthropologists nowadays as idealistically overstressing the functional benefits of such systems and subject to much revision (Black-Michaud 1975), there is clearly a sense in which some societies or social situations had and sometimes still have rules for regulating violence, including cyclical vengeance. Of course rules are flouted and perhaps are no more than conventions, broadly but not strictly followed. But their partial operation has to be acknowledged in some cases as an ideal that people in the society wish and may aim to follow. Different from this idea of rule-governed vengeance is that which has broken from or never was located in customary or legalistic regulation. The precolonial practice of so-called headhunting among Naga can be seen as governed by a code of honour. In noting the customary admissibility then of vengeance killings, Kevichusa (2010: 4) states that ‘traditional Naga society, one characterized by institutionalized violence, taught that “the failure to avenge a relative’s murder was [a] most shameful thing on the part of the living”’ (citation from Iralu 2000: 178). That the practice among the Naga should also be governed by moral rules, as among the Nuer and elsewhere, is graphically illustrated in a memo written by a British deputy commissioner in the Naga Hills, Keith Cantlie, during 1919–20. In this he describes a case of head-taking by a Sema (Sumi) villager of a mild mannered Sema and how deceased’s co-villagers, upon discovering the head in the basket of the stranger, killed him in revenge on a particular path that had been declared ‘war free’ by the British. Fearing severe consequences, the case was brought to Cantlie who decided not to punish the co-villager of the deceased for his rightful and justified avenging of a murder.10

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion 255

Discussion of this case revealed that the stranger deserved to lose his head because he had lied about his ‘achievement’ in securing the head of his victim, who had not in fact fiercely confronted him and was not given to attacking anyone. The stranger was evidently seeking a cheap hero’s welcome in his own village by pretending to have successfully collected a head in honourable battle. He had also wrongfully committed the killing on a path kept as a peace zone for purposes of trade. Similarly, in one of the most recent studies of vengeance and reconciliation, Miller (1990: 179–82) summarizes some work on the blood feud as a moral, juridical and political institution. Through meticulously documented material on Medieval Icelandic saga, he shows how, despite the inadequacy of the concept/rule to describe the broadly convergent practices of the feud, there were nevertheless broad expectations that killings must be avenged, but that there were agreements to find a peaceful solution through arbitration instead, if the circumstances seemed to merit this alternative. Christianity made some headway in urging the substitution of arbitration for blood revenge, but forgiveness did not come easily when family members were killed, and personal and family honour continued for a while to be well served through the conventions of the feud, despite the fact that there was no one word in Icelandic for the institution (Miller 1990: 189–92). In these descriptions of rule-governed feud and vengeance it is clear that the orthodox Christian claim that the healing power of forgiveness should be an unconditional route to reconciliation will tend to fail because it comes up against a tight network of alternative rights, obligations and sanctions held by people as members of groups such as clans, tribes and (extended) families. Moving to the second sense of vengeance as that which is uncontrolled by customary rules or codes, we may ask whether this is in fact that which now characterizes the killings between Naga factions, since the nationalist movement turned in on itself some five decades ago. In fact, such factional violence sometimes still runs along the lines of village, family, clan and tribe, though this is both partial and not phrased in the rule- and honour-based codes allegedly characteristic of the time of the memo written above. It is reasonable however to see some continuity in the conflicts and rivalries between these social units, as the various narratives about the past in this book suggest. In chapter 3, for example, it was shown how a number of rituals centred on the village and other units, and continuing from the past, were governed by rules emphasizing the need to guard and define boundaries and spatial zones; and that this was interpreted as the creation of a cognitive as well as social structure, a safe haven against the risks and uncertainty of leaving and moving between rival villages, clan and local areas in the present circumstances of everyday violence. Thus, while Christianity and animism have resolved many differences through pluralistic healing, the call of Christian nationalism has yet to heal its internal factions and local divisions.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

256 A Matter of Belief

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. When the nationalist movement took hold from 1947 onwards, many Naga followed the animistic religion. The amended 1971 (1961) constitution (Yehzabo) of the Federal Government of Nagaland (Naga National Council) recognized ‘freedom of religion’ and stated that ‘Protestant Christianity and Naga religion are recognized religions in Nagaland’ (Luithui and Haksar 1984: 97, 110). The information on the web page of Nagalim by the National Socialist Council of Nagaland/Nagalim, put by the Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah faction, however, claims only Protestant Christianity as the religion of Nagalim. NSCN (IM) leaders further claim evangelism as their goal, and say that the governance of independent Nagalim will be through God’s guidance (see Lotha 2009: 286–90). Not acknowledged, however, is the tacit incorporation of animistic healing within the pluralistic medico-religious system, as described in earlier chapters. It should here be noted that among the nearby Mizo the non-Christians have been marginalized since the signing of the Mizo Accord with the Indian Government and the subsequent formation of Mizoram state in 1987 (see Joshi forthcoming; and Das 2007: 40–42). See also Longkumer (2007) for the situation of Heraka practising Zeme Naga of North Cachar Hills, Assam. 2. See Longchar (2009). Longchar puts forward as the root causes of divisions among the Naga the formation of the Nagaland state within the Indian Union in 1963 and the introduction of administration based on elected legislative assembly. She outlines an interim solution to the present deadlock in the Naga situation. It proposes the view that Naga need to govern their ‘nation’ in their own way, namely that the principles of the traditional system of governance through an elected village council, which was representative of each clan division of the village, should be adopted on a larger scale. It is suggested that this system could work in the same manner as that of the Nagaland Baptist Church Council. The thesis thus supports the view the church should re-enter the political arena as negotiator between the Government of India and the Naga nationalists. 3. The two factions are distinguished by the public and media as NSCN (IM), led by Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah, and NSCN (K) led by Sagwan Sankai Khaplang. However, in the Naga newspapers, the letters, notices and rejoinders published by the two factions are signed as GPRN/NSCN and NSCN/GPRN respectively. 4. Quote from Nehru’s letter of 1952 (Mao 1992: 3; cf. Upadhyaya 2005). Retrieved 6 September 2010 from www.southasiaanalysis.org 5. Principal of Oriental Theological College, Dimapur, Nagaland, and convener of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation. 6. Retrieved 20 November 2009 from www.usiofindia.org/article_Oct_Dec07_10.html 7. ‘Forgiveness is not an option’, retrieved 10 August 2009 from www.morungexpress.com. 8. Angami words for the key concepts in talks on reconciliation – reconciliation (kezevikelie) and peace (kezikevi) – incorporate the Angami moral code of zevi, i.e. doing good to others, a characteristic that is sought in a leader and also in men and women who are selected as patrons of an age-set. The word for forgiveness is translated as kejovakecü, incorporating the idea of understanding another’s culpability. 9. Archbishop Desmond Tutu did, however, initially argue for unconditional Christian forgiveness in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Shore 2009: 69). 10. Memo by Cantlie 1919–20: ‘The eastern boundary of the Naga Hills was called THE INNER LINE. The range upon range of tree-clad hills lying to the east of for example the Tizu River were within our sphere of influence but we did not administer the area in those days. Villages were often at war with each other but few heads were taken. In one case two villages were at war for several years but only 4 heads were taken. In one case of general massacre of one village by another a small force of Assam Rifles was taken across the border and the village was made to pay a fine of so many cattle. But there was one strict rule. Fighting and headtaking was forbidden on some main paths as the transfrontier villages had to get iron, salt, cooking pots and some necessities of life from the shops at Mukokchung and Kohima. Therefore these

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Conclusion 257

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

paths had to be used in safety. One day three men came to my room in my bungalow. One was a Sema dobashi clothed in the official red blanket and another man who could speak Sema besides his own language and a third man carrying a bundle of cloth who could converse with man number two in his own language. The dobashi could talk with me in bastard Assamese. I knew Angami but no Sema. The third man with the cloth bundle said that he and a friend were walking along a main path eastwards when they met a man carrying a basket on his back. They sat down for a talk and the stranger told them that a fierce fellow had quarrelled with him on the path and attacked him, having drawn his long handled axe which every Naga carries in a sling of wood on his back. To defend himself the narrator had to draw his dao. They fought fiercely and the narrator won and took the head of the attacker. The head was in the basket. The narrator and his friend gave some rice beer to the stranger and meanwhile the narrator looked under the cloth covering the contents of the basket and saw the head and also two feet. The feet are at times cut off but rarely. Now these feet were peculiar. They had six toes instead of five. So the narrator gave the stranger another drink of beer and made a sign to his friend to come to look into the basket. The friend said that he agreed with me that these were the feet of Injevi of our village who was a mild man not given to attacking anyone. So said the narrator, “I whispered to my friend to give the stranger a drink of rice beer and when he stretches out his hand to take the bamboo mug leave the rest to me”. When the stranger stretched out his arm to take the beer I drew my dao and off came his head. When I got back to my village the elders said I would get into serious trouble for taking a head on this main path so we called the Sema dobashi who was in the neighbourhood and he brought me to tell my tale to the Deputy Commissioner. I thought over the matter and said, “I think your story is true. I will not punish you”. He turned to go then came back and asked whether I would like to see the head as it was in the cloth. I had been conscious of an unpleasant smell in the room for some time but thought it came from my visitors as it was the cold weather when no rain falls to wash bodies. No, I did not want to see the head. He took it with him in triumph for he would be greeted as a hero in his village.’ (Typescript memo loaned by Dr Audrey Cantlie, Naga Database)

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

APPENDIX 1

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Essay

In and around Nagaland University, in north-east India, there are people who comment wryly on the importance of the Naga peoples in nurturing European anthropology in the early twentieth century, while they themselves are only now able to set up their own department in the subject.1 They point to colonial government officials, missionaries, scholars and other travellers who wrote extensive ethnographies, with one, Hutton, becoming professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University, another, von-Fürer-Haimendorf, establishing the subject at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and others known for their publications and association with academic institutions, including Elwin, Mills, Balfour and Kauffmann. Political unrest and Indian Government restrictions on movement in the region thereafter reduced the possibilities for research, and a long lull ensued with few scholars able to enter the area, although some research theses in Britain were based on secondary sources (Needham 1950–51; Valentine 1974; McDonaugh 1978; Gray 1977 [also 1986]; and West 1984, 1992). It was during this period of reduced research activity that the fieldwork for this book was begun and has since been continued. It is thus intermediary between the early period and a recent rekindling of interest among Naga themselves and outsiders, following a relaxation on research restrictions in Nagaland. It is relevant therefore in this commentary to place the work in this scholarly trajectory since its findings cover a period of increasing Naga consciousness of their role and status in what has come to be viewed as accelerating globalization. In the decade 2000–2010, the renewed interest amongst travellers and ethnographers has been directly related to the opening of access to Nagaland to international tourists from the year 2000. As if to underline the sometimes uncertain line between ethnography and voyeuristic tourism, it was then that the Nagaland state government celebrated the first year of the new millennium by combining statehood commemoration on 1 December with a touristic event called the Hornbill Festival which showcased diversity in the heritage of various Naga groups (and the Kachari community) in the form of songs, dances, food, and material culture. The festival was such a success that a

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

260 Appendix 1

special heritage village was built at Kisama, on the outskirts of Kohima town near the villages of Kigwema and Mima (Joshi 2008c). Many pictorial works on the Naga have been published since 2003, including my own book (Arya and Joshi 2004) based on extensive travels by the photographer Aditya Arya and myself in 1987 and 1990–91. By the time the book came out in 2004 some of the photographs were already of a historical nature due to the rapid conversion to Christianity and also the death of those from an older generation who had remembered the days of Hutton, Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf. A travel book celebrating the ‘exotic’ aspects of Naga, documenting what remains of the older lifestyle of Naga peoples and emphasizing the travels of white men to remote areas, was written by a German couple Aglaja Stirn and Peter van Ham (2003). Peter van Ham and the late Jamie Saul, a South African businessman interested in the Naga people of Burma and India, wrote a tour diary (2008) inspired by J.H. Hutton’s official tour diary of 1927. Jamie Saul, with Dominique Viallard (an allopathic doctor by training), also wrote a separate book on Burmese Naga (2005) based on his regular travels to an organized tourist festival in the township of Lahe in Burma. While these coffee-table books do not purport to scholarly analysis, their pursuit of the exotic give us some idea of the continuity of some tradition and thus counter the pessimistically styled writings of some Western scholars who consider that Christianity has led to the destruction of a people’s culture and a feeling of shame about past cultural practices (see Oppitz 2008). These books capture a resurgence of interest among the Europeans. In 2011, West published his doctoral theses on colonial collections from the Naga Hills in British Museums. In 2008 two international exhibitions on the Naga were held, in Zurich and Basel. While the Zurich team concentrated on the passage of the Naga from precolonial to colonial and contemporary, the Basel team exhibition, for which I was a guest curator, focused on collectors, objects and the history of museum collecting. Both exhibitions were accompanied by complementary publications: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered, referring to the object collection that had not been given attention since the 1930s, and Naga Identities, which focused on the research work being done on the Naga and by the Naga themselves. The objects depicting a way of life and the contemporary aspect of the Naga were told through video links, photos, films made by both the Naga themselves and others, as well as an art installation by London-based Naga artist Temsüyanger Longkumer and a series of sculptures by a Swiss artist who had been inspired by Konyak Naga wood carvings and metalwork. Naga authors (Easterine Kire alias Iralu and Temsula Ao) and those involved in the reconciliation effort for a peaceful negotiation between different Naga nationalist groups and the Naga civilians were invited to give lectures. The Zurich exhibition focused on the ‘loss’ of a culture, with the project on oral tradition lamenting the passing of traditional knowledge. But one may ask what is indeed traditional? Even the writers of the first monographs on the Naga were engaged in what is now called salvage ethnography. Hutton himself acknowledged this fact in the preface to

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Appendix 1 261

the second edition of his book on the Angami Naga published in 1969. It is indeed rather disturbing to note that some scholars are unable to appreciate the creativity in change and expect a people to remain static (even mocking the culture of the Naga youth and their love of rock music). Some recent publications by Naga female authors in the genre of novels, short stories and poetry are of a reflective nature and are based on the actual experience of the authors or on the narratives of those who have lived through the winds of change and have been active or silent participants in the history of the Naga people. An Angami author, Easterine Kire (alias Iralu), has written three books that take the reader to the heart of the Angami way of living – a slice of life as lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book, A Naga Village Remembered (Iralu 2003), narrates events leading up to the Khonoma rebellion of 1879 and the changes that British annexation, American missionaries and conversion to Christianity brought to the life of a family. The second novel, A Terrible Matriarchy (Iralu 2007), is a coming-of-age story which follows the life trajectory of a young girl who grows up straddling a ‘traditional’ family set-up and the contemporary world of the Angami Naga in which Christianity, the presence of the Indian Army, the Naga nationalist movement and alcoholism are all part of contemporary living.2 These two novels were the closest depiction in fictional form of the concepts that I came across during my fieldwork and of the observations I made of family life when living with my Naga friends and hosts in townships and villages. Her third book, Mari, a semi-fictionalized account based on her maternal aunt’s life (as a Christian) during the Second World War Battle of Kohima, is a narrative that brings out the profound impact of the war on the lives of people who found themselves in its throes, and the hard choices they had to make. Significant, too, in its combined use of ethnographic fieldwork and archives is the book published in 2010 on the Naga about the Heraka, a charismatic religion practised by the Zeme of North Cachar Hills in Assam. It is written by Arkotong Longkumer, a Naga of the Ao group who was trained in religious studies and theology. Reading these and other contemporary works, from the touristic and fictional to the scholarly, it seems a far cry from those written by earlier commentators who, as relatively recent outsiders, inevitably objectified the Naga as non-participants in their lives, despite their sometimes empathetic involvement with them, not always without misunderstanding. And yet these early publications have made an often considerable impression on Naga perceptions of themselves in history and they must be acknowledged as such, for they inform some of what we know of the Naga today and hence this book. The very first accounts of the Naga were written by the British officers who were leading exploratory and punitive expeditions to the Naga Hills in the mid-nineteenth century. Major Butler, Captain Butler, Major Jenkins and Colonel Mackenzie are the first few officers to provide an insight into Naga villages, writing first on Lotha and Angami groups along the Assam border. These accounts repeatedly mention the warlike nature of Naga and the practice

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

262 Appendix 1

of headhunting among them. The narratives also describe the difficulty in reaching these villages through thick rainforests, up steep hills and in constant fear of ambush by the ‘hostile Nagas’. In fact, several officers and soldiers lost their lives in such ambushes. Well documented incidents are the killing of Captain Butler in 1875, when he was leading an expedition in the Lotha Naga area, and the killing of the then Political Officer to Naga Hills, Damant, at Khonoma in 1879. Some of these tour reports3 have been published as books and articles, and Verrier Elwin collected texts from these and several other sources in his Nagas in the Nineteenth Century (1969). These texts also bring to our attention the difficult physical conditions under which the expeditions were carried out, and the constant tussle with the Naga. Other sources of first-hand information are the official reports in the District Gazetteers that were published by the Government of India during the British rule. A different perspective is found in the writings of the missionaries. The first missionary to station himself among the Naga was Reverend Bronson of the American Baptist Mission in the 1840s. After a gap of nearly four decades, Reverend E.W. Clark and his fellow missionaries were successful in establishing a mission centre. The letters written by them to the American Baptist Home Board are a valuable source of information on their impressions of the Naga, their struggles, and their successes and disappointments in setting up the mission. I was able to access and copy some letters at the archives of the American Baptist Historical Society at the Mission Centre in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.4 It was not easy to read these letters. Most by Clark were difficult to decipher, being written on both sides of onion skin paper. The later correspondence from the 1930s onwards is mostly typed and so is easy to read. Most letters were in fact reports written to the Baptist Home Office, informing them of the need to carry out evangelical activity among the Naga.5 The language used is typical of mission writings, in which phrases such as ‘a field ready for the harvest’ are used frequently. The language is, as Beidelman calls it, ‘peculiar’.6 The contents of some of these letters were published in the Baptist Mission newsletters. Some are of a personal nature, concerning squabbles between the missionaries on their different methods of working, and the displeasure among the converts at the disparity in the salaries of white and native missionaries. Some letters of Supplee written in the 1930s and 1940s also recount differences of opinion with British officers, such as J.P. Mills. The contents of some of the letters have also been published in recent books on Baptist Missions in north-east India. Books by Puthenpurakal (1984), Barpujari (1986) and Downs (1971, 1983) have been a valuable source of letters and unpublished reports that I could not access. Besides the correspondence with the Home Board, missionaries also published memoirs and articles; Mary Clark, who was Clark’s wife and co-missionary in the Ao Naga area, wrote a memoir of their first years among the Ao Nagas. Entitled A Corner in India (1907), the work gives a glimpse of missionary life in the

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Appendix 1 263

geographical area that, at the beginning of the mission, lay outside the British territory. Some missionaries also published articles7 in journals such as the Asiatic Society of West Bengal. The personal correspondence of Reverend (Doctor) Rivenburg, his wife Hattie and daughter Narola8 was published by the latter as The Star of Naga Hills (1941), and is very revealing of the way missionaries viewed their work and lives among the Naga. W.C. Smith, a missionary and sociologist, wrote a monograph on the Ao Naga in 1925. His book, The Ao Naga Tribe of Assam: A Study in Ethnology and Sociology, provides an insight into the sociocultural changes that were occurring among the Ao Naga through the introduction of Christianity and new medical practices. In the early part of the twentieth century, the first ethnographic monographs on Naga communities were published. They followed the guidelines of Notes and Queries on Anthropology (Freire-Marreco and Myers 1912), and the genealogical research was based on the pamphlet, The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry by Rivers (1910). These monographs follow a set pattern describing the domestic, political and ritual lives of the people studied, as prescribed by the Assam Administration (Hutton 1921a: viii). J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills were the pioneers. Both of them spent several years in the Naga Hills as district commissioners during which they toured the area and arbitrated in inter-village disputes.9 Their monographs on the Angami (1921a), Sumi (as Sema 1921b), Lotha (as Lhota 1922), Ao (1926) and Rengma (1937) Naga are detailed, but were geared more towards presenting an account close to the ‘traditional’ way of life of the Naga. In the preface to the book on the Angami Naga, Hutton reiterates the lament of S.E. Peal, who had appealed for a ‘careful study of Naga tribes before they are “reformed and hopelessly sophisticated”’ (1921a: vii). In the second edition of the Angami Naga published in 1969 by the state government of Nagaland, Hutton wrote that the account given in his 1921 edition was of a ‘historical’ nature and admitted that the first edition was more of a salvage anthropology than an account of the change that was occurring during his time as the district commissioner of Naga Hills. Neither Hutton nor Mills go into details when mentioning the changes taking place due to the introduction of Christianity and education, and the exposure of the peoples of Naga Hills to outside forces, especially the monetary economy; they prefer to expatiate on the romantic theme of a lost way of life. J.P. Mills, in fact, severely criticized the role of missionaries in one of his articles in the Indian Census report of 1935. In later years, after their return to England, both Hutton10 and Mills wrote several articles in anthropological journals after taking up posts as professor and reader of anthropology at the University of Cambridge and School of Oriental and African Studies in London, respectively. Much before Hutton and Mills’ monographs, T.C. Hodson, another officer posted in the adjacent state of Manipur, wrote the The Naga Tribes of Manipur (1911), which gives a comparative account of the customs of the Naga ethnic groups of Manipur. Three European anthropologists, Fürer-Haimendorf, Kauffmann and Ursula Bower, conducted research among different Naga groups

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

264 Appendix 1

in the first half of the twentieth century. Fürer-Haimendorf was the most prolific writer of the three. His fieldwork diaries of 1935–36, which were later published as books, are an invaluable source of information and insights. Most of Kauffmann’s publications (1935, 1938, 1939, 1944, 1953, etc.)11 were in German and have not been translated into English, and tend to contain more information on material culture than social organization. Ursula Bower (1939, 1946, 1950, 1950a, and 1953), who undertook a documentation project for the Pitt Rivers Museum, wrote travelogues based on her tours among Tangkhul and Kabui, and fieldwork among the Zemi (now Zeme) Nagas. She also submitted a thesis on the Zemi for the diploma in Anthropology at University College, London. Archival material comprising tour diaries of Hutton and Balfour, who toured Naga Hills in 1922–23, and the letters exchanged between Hutton, Mills and Balfour are available at the Pitt Rivers Museum archives in Oxford. FürerHaimendorf’s field diaries, including his travels in Angami areas in southern parts of Naga Hills have been largely published in his books The Naked Nagas (1939) and its second edition, Return to the Naked Nagas (1976). Unpublished diaries of Fürer-Haimendorf (1936–37, Mildred Archer (1947), wife of W.F. Archer, one of the last British officers to be posted in the Naga Hills, have been made available through the Cambridge Naga Videodisc Project which was undertaken by a team led by Professor Alan Macfarlane of Cambridge University. It is to his credit that the voluminous videodisc, containing both published and unpublished material along with photographs and films has, since 2005, been available freely on the internet as ‘nagadatabase’ on his personal website www.alanmacfarlane.com.12 Most other writings on the Naga since those of the colonial era concentrate on political issues, especially on insurgency and human rights issues.13 Some books like the ones written by P. Singh ([1972] 1995) and H. Sema (1986) are general books on Nagaland, focusing on sociocultural and political aspects, others (for example, Horam 1977) are general description of a single Naga group. The book by Jacobs et al. (1990), which accompanied the release of the Naga videodisc and an exhibition of Naga artifacts at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is largely based on archival work, except for its final chapter which draws on contemporary material provided by Lily Das and myself. Abraham Lotha’s book, History of Naga Anthropology 1832–1947 (Lotha 2007), based on his master’s thesis, is a critique of colonial writings. In terms of ethnography N.K. Das’s14 book (1993) on Zonuo-keyhonuo Nagas or the Southern Angami is one of the few recent anthropological works available on the Naga.15 Although based on short fieldwork in Visewema village, it gives valuable information on kinship and customary law among the Southern Angami. Another book on the Khiamniungan Nagas by a retired army officer, Sardeshpande (1987), is a straightforward descriptive account, more in the line of the old ethnographic documentation. In addition, there is a travelogue by Milada Ganguli entitled A Pilgrimage to Nagaland (1984). Although hailed by its publishers as an anthropological work, it is basically a diary of her travels, but some of the description has been taken from the earlier monographs written by

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Appendix 1 265

Hutton and Mills. A recent addition to the literature on Angami is a book on the oral history of village formation by Visier Sanyü (1996), an Angami Naga historian. In the past three decades some books have been written and published by Naga writers in the Ao and Tenyidie languages. Books about Angami customs in Tenyidie are mostly written by Shurhouzoli, a former Minister of Education of Nagaland and a member of Ura Academy.16 Most books in Nagaland are published privately by individuals in limited numbers and thus often go out of print. Given the prominence of the role of Christianity in this book, it is relevant to note also the vast literature on religion in north-east India and especially Nagaland, for again this informs the way Naga see themselves at the present time.17 The Christian Literature Centre in Dimapur is well stocked with such books. Most concern the history of the introduction of the Baptist Church (for example, Downs 1971, 1992; Downs, Sangma and Syiemlieh 1994; Barpujari 1986; Puthenpurakal 1984; Bengdangyabang 2002, 2004; Philip 1983). There are also biographical accounts of Naga missionaries who pioneered the spread of Christianity to the northern and eastern parts of Nagaland, for example, an account of Reverend Longri Ao by Rao (1986) and Beers (1969). Recently Reverend Ben Wati (2009) has also published his memoirs translated from Ao into English. These are particularly revealing of the life of a young boy who lived in the Christian village of Impur and went to missionary school where he was taught by both American and Ao Naga teachers. Many Naga students in fact now go outside Nagaland to study for Masters and research degrees in theology. Some of the master’s theses have been published in slim paperbacks by the Indian Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (ISPCK). Some theses written at theological seminaries in the United States are now also available online. The subjects range from indigenous Naga theology, for example, the book Tsungremology: Ao Naga Christian Theology (1994) written by Alem Ao, former principal of Clark Theological College, Aolijen, to Angami hymnody, the role of women in church, and issues of leadership and Naga identity. In addition to the archival and bibliographic research for this book, I have spent some twenty-six months in the field, spread over a long period from 1985 to the present, and continuing. The restrictions on travel in Nagaland during the period have necessitated only short-term visits of up to three months at a time.

Notes 1. At the time of writing, Nagaland University has received a five-year funding from the Indian University Grants Commission to set up a department of Anthropology, which results from an initiative on the part of former Vice Chancellor, Professor Kannan, and myself in collaboration with Richard Kunz of Museum der Kulturen Basel and Anungla Aier of Kohima Science College.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

266 Appendix 1

2. Her latest novel, Bitter Wormwood (Kire 2011), focuses on the Naga nationalist movement. Fictionalising real life stories, she highlights the futile loss of lives and the divisions that have made the movement directionless. 3. For example, see the writings of Major John Butler (1855), Captain John Butler (1942), Hutton (1929) Mackenzie (1884), Shakespear (1913, 1914), and Woodthorpe (1875–76, 1882). 4. In 1996, I could only obtain permission to research the archives for three days, as there was very limited desk space for research work at Valley Forge. However, I was allowed to make copies of the relevant letters, some of which are no longer available for photocopying. The archives held by the American Baptist Historical Society have been moved to the Atlanta campus of Mercer University in the United States. Information on accessibility is available via web page: http://www.abhsarchives.org/index.html. 5. A similar viewpoint is found in missionary writing of the period in other parts of the world. Beidelman sums up the genre of missionary writings of this era in his book Colonial Evangelism: ‘Missionaries seek to confirm the purpose and sincerity of their efforts, yet need to present a sufficiently grim picture of heathen conditions and the struggle of evangelization to promote more support from home – but always with enough glimmers of success to encourage enthusiasm. A reader is sometimes hard put to keep some balance in evaluating such accounts’ (1982: xviii). 6. He elaborates, quoting from Leys (1926: 262): ‘every occupation has its jargon. But none can be quite as nauseous as the dialect used in missionary circles’ (cf. Beidelman 1982: xviii). 7. For example, see Clark (1879, 1911), Smith (1923), and Tanquist (1927). 8. Incidentally, Narola is an Ao Naga name, which literally means ‘flower’. 9. The disputes, mostly concerning village boundary issues, have continued. Interestingly, the arbitration given by the British political officers is still referred to by the present-day district commissioners when dealing with these long-running disputes (personal communication with Kiran Siddhu, Deputy Commissioner of Phek in 1991). 10. Hutton also wrote the well-known book, Caste in India (1946). 11. The bibliography in Hartwig’s (1970) book (in German) on the economy and social structure of the Nagas lists most of Kauffmann’s publications. 12. See Macfarlane 2008 for an article detailing the digitalization of the database. 13. For examples books by Nibedan (1978, 1981), Gundevia (1975), Luithui and Haksar (1984), Rustomji (1983), Horam (1988), Maxwell (1980), Mankekar (1967), Singh ([1972] 1995) Iralu K.D. (2000), Kirkwood (1997); Chasie (1999) and Franke (2009). Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights, or NPMHR, has become the most vocal group to protest against the Indian Army’s presence and its conduct in Nagaland and Manipur, through conferences and the publishing of pamphlets. 14. He is an anthropologist with the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta. The Anthropological Survey of India has also published a separate volume on Nagaland edited by Singh, Das and Imechen (1994) in the series, People of India. 15. R. Vashum (2000) published his Ph.D. thesis in social anthropology (Delhi University). The book deals with the political issue of self-determination, which repeats what has already been said in several other books on Naga politics. He has also published a co-edited book (Vashum and Iheilung 1996) containing essays by Naga research students and activists. 16. A film has also been made by Ate Sakhrie on the legend of the ‘Sopfünuo rock’ at the Angami village of Rüsoma. Several documentaries have been made by Naga and non-Naga film makers on the Naga political situation. 17. For example, books by: Nuh (1996); Nuh (ed. 1996); Konyak (1986); Keitzer (1987); Mhasi (1995); Ao, L (1976); Serto (1986); Dozo (n.d.).

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

APPENDIX 2 Inscription on the Stone Tablet in Upper Chajouba Village

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In the memory of Chitebo Est. 1930 The MAKHEL TRIBES The Makhel tribes known as Nagas were originated from Makhel village. It is said that Chitebo tree is the first known tree among the Nagas. The whole tribe once were gathered at the foot of this tree and took departure to go to different places. It is said that if a branch has come out, it is a sign of increase in population. When a branch of it has been broken the whole tribe observe a day as a genna. Therefore it should be regarded as a respectable tree. A young tree of it also has grown up in the year 1960. There is also a memorable place called ‘PIECHARABU’ at the top of this village. Founded by – SRI S. KOMOU on 23.2.30 Translated by (…) Inaugurated by SRI D. KAISU Village Chief [sic]

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

APPENDIX 3

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Angami Calendar (khrü phrü)

Angami

Approximate corresponding month of Gregorian calendar

Dosü Kezei Kera Ketshü Cacü Cadi Mvüsa Tsiarie Rüyo Thenyie Ziephie Rüde

January February March April May June July August September October November December

Kenou

An extra month is added near February during the leap year. The name of the month literally means ‘remembering a generation after three years’.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABCC. 2010. ABCC 125 years 1885–2010 Jesus Christ the Hope of the World. Seweda. Kerhei Dzükru. Kohima: Angami Baptist Church Council. Alemrenba, S. 2004. ‘Developing a Conflict Resolution Model for the Ministry of Reconciliation among the Nagas: With Special Reference to Changtongya and Yachem villages’, D.Min. dissertation. Serampore: Senate of Serampore College. Allen, B.C. 1905. ‘Naga Hills and Manipur’, in Assam District Gazetteers. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Allen, N.J. 1976. ‘Approaches to Illness in the Nepalese Hills’, in J.B. Loudon (ed.), Social Anthropology and Medicine. London: Academic Press. ———. 1980. ‘Tibet and the Thulung Rai: Toward a Comparative Mythology of the Bodic speakers’, in M. Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi (eds) Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Allister, D.S. 1981. Sickness and Healing in the Church. Latimer Studies II. Oxford: Latimer House. Aloysius, P. 1988. An Asian Theology of Liberation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Amit, V. (ed.). 2000. Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge. Amstutz, M. R. 2005. The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Ao, A.L. 2002. From Phizo to Muivah: The Naga National Question in North-East India. Delhi: Mittal Publications. Ao, L. 1976. Nagaland Baptist Church Council Report. Ao, M. Alemchiba. 1970. A Brief Historical Account of Nagaland. Kohima, Nagaland: Naga Institute of Culture. Ao, O.A. 1994. Tsungremology: Ao Naga Christian Theology. Mokokchung: Clark Theological College. Ao, T. 2000. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone. New Delhi: Zubaan. Archer, M. 1947. ‘Journey to Nagaland. An Account of Six Months Spent in the Naga Hills in 1947’, typescript, Cambridge Naga Videodisc. Also available at Naga Database. Arya A. and V. Joshi. 2004. The Land of the Nagas. Ahmedabad: Mapin, and Ocean Township, NJ: Grantha Corporation. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Assam Administration Report. 1882–1883.Naga Database, www.alanmacfarlane.com.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

272 Bibliography

Atkinson, J.M. 1989. The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1992. ‘Shamanism Today’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21, 307–30. Balfour, H. 1921. ‘Foreword’, in The Sema Nagas, J.H. Hutton. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. ———. 1922–23. Diary of a Tour in the Naga Hills, Assam, Tour Note Books, Balfour Ms. B 3. Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum Archives. Barker, J. 1993. ‘“We are Ekelesia”: Conversion in Uiaku, Papua New Guinea’, in R.W. Hefner (ed.) Conversion to Christianity (ed.). Berkeley: California University Press. Barnes, R.H., A. Gray and B. Kingsbury (eds). 1995. Indigenous Peoples of Asia. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies. Barpujari, H.K. 1986. The American Missionaries and Northeast India (1836–1900 AD): A Documentary Study. Delhi: Spectrum Publications. ———. 1992. The Comprehensive History of Assam, Volume II. Guwahati: Assam Publication Board. Baruah, S. 2005. Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bautista, J. and F. Khek Gee Lim. 2009. Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict. London, New York: Routledge. Beattie, J.H.M. 1980. ‘On Understanding Sacrifice’, in M.F.C. Bourdillon and Myer Fortes (eds) Sacrifice. London: Academic Press. Beers, R.G. 1969. Walk the Distant Hills: The Story of Longri Ao. New York: Friendship Press. Beidelman, T.O. 1982. Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bell, C. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bendangjungshi. 2011. Confessing Christ in the Naga Context. Towards a Liberating Ecclesiology. Contact Zone, Explorations in Intercultural Theology. Münster: Lit Verlag. Bengdangyabang, A. 2002. History of Christianity in Nagaland: The Ao Naga Tribal Christian Mission Enterprise 1872–1972. Mokokchung and Banglore: Shalom Ministry Publication. ———. 2004. History of Christianity in Nagaland: Social Change 1872–1972. Bangalore: Shalom Ministry Publication. Benedict, P.K. 1972. Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Betts, U. 1950. ‘Village Organization under the Central Nzemi Naga’. M.A. dissertation. London: University College. Retrieved 20 June 2010 from Naga Database, www.alanmacfarlane.com. Bhuyan, S.K. [1965] 1985. Studies in the History of Assam. New Delhi: Omsons Publications. Bialecki, J., N. Haynes and J. Robbins. 2008. ‘The Anthropology of Christianity’, Religious Compass 2(6), 1139–58. Black-Michaud, J. 1975 Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Oxford: B. Blackwell. Bloch, M. 1977. ‘The Past and the Present in the Present’, Man 12, 278–92. ———. 1986. From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 273

Bloch, M. and J. Parry (eds). 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boddy, J. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———.1994. ‘Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 23, 407–34. Boruah, B.K. 1993. Nagamese: The Language of Nagaland. New Delhi: Mittal Publication. Bourdieu, P. [1972] 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowen, J. 2000. ‘Imputations of Faith and Allegiance: Islamic Prayer and Indonesian Politics outside the Mosque’, in D. Parkin and S. Headley (eds) Islamic Prayer across the Indian Ocean. London: Curzon Press, pp. 23–38. Bower, U.G. 1939. ‘The Kabui and Tangkhul Nagas’, Royal Central Asian Journal XXVI: 5–19. ———. 1946. ‘Cycle of Migration of the Zemi Nagas’, Man in India XXVI: 50–52. ———. 1950a. Naga Path. London: Butler & Turner. ———. 1950b. Drums behind the Hills. New York: Morrow. ———. 1953. The Hidden Land. London: Murray. Bowers, A.C. 1929. Under Head-hunters’ Eyes. Philadelphia: The Judson Press. Burdick, J. 1993. Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burling, R. 1960. ‘Angami Naga Phonemics and Wordlist’, Indian Linguistics 21. Butler, Major J. 1847. A Sketch of Assam, With some Accounts of the Hill Tribes, by an Officer. London. ———. 1855. Travels and Adventures in the Province of Assam during a Residence of Fourteen Years. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Butler, Capt. J. 1871. Administration Report of the Naga Hills, 1870–71. Calcutta. ———. 1875. ‘Rough Notes on the Angami Nagas and their Language’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal XLIV: 307–46. ———. 1875–79. ‘Tour Diaries’, Cambridge Naga Videodisc. ———. 1942. Tour Diaries of the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, 1870, 1870–72, 1873. Shillong. Buxton, J. 1973. Religion and Healing in Mandari. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cambridge Naga Videodisc. 1990. See Naga Database at www.alanmacfarlane.com. Cannell, F.2005. ‘The Christianity of Anthropology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(2): 335–56. Cannell, F. (ed.). 2006. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Caplan, L. 1987. Class and Culture in Urban India: Fundamentalism in a Christian Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Caputo, V. 2000. ‘At “Home” and “Away”: Reconfiguring the Field for Late Twentiethcentury Anthropology’, in V. Amit (ed.) Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge. Cawley, Mrs R. 1930. ‘Account of Siege of Kohima in 1879’, Assam Review. ———. n.d. ‘Account of Siege of Kohima in 1879’, typescript, J.H. Hutton papers. Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum Archives.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

274 Bibliography

Chase-Roy, A. 2000. ‘Impact of Christianity on the Status of Angami Naga Women from 1878 to the Present’. Ph.D. dissertation. Serampore: Senate of Serampore College. Chasie, C. 1999. The Naga Imbroglio: A Personal Perspective. Guwahati: United Publishers. Chatterji, S.K. 1951. ‘Kirata-jana-kriti, the Indo-Mongoloids: Their Contribution to the History and Culture of India’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 16, 143–235. Chinai, Rupa. 2004. ‘“Even if we shout there is no one to hear”: Reproductive Health Issues among the Marginalized Population of Nagaland’, in Mohan Rao (ed.) The Unheard Scream: Reproductive Health and Women’s Lives in India. New Delhi: Zubaan and Panos Institute, pp. 109–26. Census of India. 1971. Population Tables. Government of India Publications. Census of India. 2001. Population Tables. Government of India Publications. Clark, E.W. 1879. ‘A Specimen of the Zoongee (or Zurngee) Dialect of a Tribe of Nagas, Bordering on the Valley of Assam, between Dikho and Desoi Rivers, Embracing over Forty Villages’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society II: 278–86. ———. 1911. Ao-Naga Dictionary. Calcutta. Clark, M.M. [1907] 1978. A Corner in India. Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society. Coleman, S. 2000. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, J. 1980. ‘Healing and the Cultural Order: The Case of the Barolong boo Ratshidi’, American Ethnologist 7(4): 637–57. ———. 1981. ‘Healing and Cultural Transformation: The Case of the Tswana of Southern Africa’, Social Science and Medicine 15(B): 367–78. ———. 1985. Body of Power Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder CO, Oxford: Westview. Constable, N. 1994. Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits: a Hakka Community in Hong Kong. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coppett, D. de (ed.) 1992. Understanding Rituals. London: Routledge. Csordas, T. (ed.). 2009. Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Damant, G.H. 1879. Report on the Administration of the Naga Hills for the Year 1878–79. Shillong. Daniels, C.W. 1898–99. ‘On Transmission of Proteosoma to Birds by the Mosquito: A Report to the Malaria Committee of the Royal Society’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 64: 443–54. Das, N.K. 1993. Kinship, Politics, and Law in Naga Society. Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India. Das, S.K. 2007. ‘Conflict and Peace in India’s Northeast: The Role of Civil Society’, Policy Studies 42. Washington: East-West Center. Retrieved 20 November 2009 from www.eastwestcenter.org. Das, V. and J. Parry. 1983. ‘Fieldwork in South Asia’, Man 18: 790–91.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 275

Davies, C.A. 1999. Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. London: Routledge. Davis, A.W. 1891. ‘Naga Tribes’, Assam Census Report, Part I: 237–51. Davis-Floyd, R.E. and C. Sargent (eds). 1997. Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-cultural Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Desjarlais, R.R. 1990. Samsara’s Sadness: Sherpa Shamanism and the Calling of Souls. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Information Service. ———. 1992. ‘Yolmo Aesthetics of Person, Health and “soul loss”’, Social Science and Medicine 34: 1105–17. ———. (1992) 1994. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas. Devisch, R. 1993. Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gynecological Healing Cult among the Yaka. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Dirks, N.B. (ed). (1992) 1995. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Douglas, M. 1972. ‘Deciphering a Meal’, Daedalus: 61–81. Downs, F.S. 1971. The Mighty Works of God: A Brief History of the Council of Baptist Churches in Northeast India, the Mission Period 1836–1950. Gauhati: The Christian Literature Centre. ———. 1983. Christianity in Northeast India: Historical Perspectives. Delhi: ISPCK. ———. 1992. History of Christianity in India: Northeast India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Bangalore: Church History Association of India. ———. 2010. ‘Christian Conversion Movements in Northeast India’, in T.K. Oommen (ed.) Social Movements I: Issues of Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 223–28. Downs, F., M. Sangma and D. Syiemlieh (eds). 1994. Essays on Christianity in Northeast India. New Delhi: Indus Publications Co. Dozo, P. (n.d.). Hill Tribes Now for Tribes in India: A Challenge for Evangelisation. Kohima: Nagaland Baptist Church Council. Driem, G. van, 2008. ‘The Naga Language Groups within the Tibeto-Burman Language Family’, in Oppitz et al. (eds) Naga Identities Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoek Publishers, pp. 311–21. Drucker-Brown, S. 1999–2000. ‘The Politics of Calendar’, Cambridge Anthropology 21(3): 9–17. Dube, S.C. 1953. Token Pre-puberty Marriages in Middle India, Man 53: 18–19. Dumont, L. 1964. Marriage in India: The Present State of the Question II. Marriage and Status, Nayar and Newar. Contributions to Indian Sociology 7: 80–89. ———. 1972. Homo Hierarchius: The Caste System and its Implications. London: Paladin. Eaton, R.M. 1984. ‘Conversion to Christianity among the Nagas, 1876–1971’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 11(1): 1–43. ———. 1997. ‘Comparative History as World History: Religious Conversion in Modern India’, Journal of World History 8(2): 243–71. ———. (n.d.). ‘Conversion to Christianity among the Nagas of India, 1876–1971’. Typescript. Eliade, M. [1951] 1974. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Elwin, V. [1957] 1959. A Philosophy for NEFA. Shillong: NEFA Administration.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

276 Bibliography

———. 1961. Nagaland. Shillong: The Research Department, Advisor’s Secretariat. ———. (ed.). 1969. Nagas in the Nineteenth Century. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Engelke, M. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engelke, M. and M. Tomlinson (eds). 2006. The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— [1956] 1962. Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Farb, P. and G. Armelagos. 1980. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. New York: Washington Square Press. Fernandes, S. 2009. ‘Ethnicity, Civil Society, and the Church: The Politics of Evangelical Christianity in Northeast India’, in D.H. Lumsdaine (ed) Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 131–53. Foster, G.M. 1976. ‘Disease Etiologies in Non-Western Medical Systems’, American Anthropologist 78: 773–82. Frake, C.O. 1961. ‘The Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanum of Mindanao’, American Anthropologist 63: 113–32. Franke, M. 2009. War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Frankel, S. and G. Lewis (eds). 1989. A Continuing Trial of Treatment: Medical Pluralism in Papua New Guinea. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Freire-Marreco B. and J.L. Myers. 1912. Notes and Queries on Anthropology. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Fürer-Haimendorf, C.V. 1936–37. Diaries. Trans. R. Barnes. Cambridge Naga Videodisc and Naga Database, www.alanmacfarlane.com. ———. 1939. The Naked Nagas. London: Macmillan. ———. 1969. The Konyak Nagas: An Indian Frontier Tribe. London: Holt, Renehart & Wilson. ———. 1976. Return to the Naked Nagas: An Anthropologist’s View of Nagaland 1936– 1970. New Delhi: Vikas. ———. (ed.). 1981. Asian Highland Societies in Anthropological Perspective. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. ———. 1984. ‘Naga People’. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Gait, E.A. 1898. ‘Note on Human Sacrifice amongst the Nagas’, in ‘Human Sacrifice in Ancient Assam’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 67: 56–65. Gangopadhyay, D.K. 1990. Revenue Administration in Assam. Dispur, Assam: Government of Assam. Ganguli, M. 1984. A Pilgrimage to the Nagas. New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing Co. Geertz, C. 1973b. ‘Person, Time and Conduct in Bali’, in C. Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana Press. Gennep, A. van. 1909. Les rites de passage. Paris: É. Nourry. George, M.C. (ed.). 1990. Centenary of the Catholic Church in Northeast India 1890– 1990. Shillong: Archbishop’s House. Ghosh, B.B. 1982. History of Nagaland. New Delhi: S. Chand & Co. Giridhar, P.P. 1980. Angami Grammar. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 277

Gluckman, M. 1963. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa: Collected Essays with an Autobiographical Introduction. London: Cohen & West. Good, B.J. 1994. Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J. 1977. ‘Against “Ritual”: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic’, in S.F. Moore and B.G. Myerhoff (eds) Secular Ritual. Assen: Van Gorcum. ———. 1993. The Culture of Flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, A. 1977. ‘Structural Transformation in Nagaland’. MA dissertation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University. ———. 1986. The British in Nagaland – Their Anthropology and their Legacy, IWGIA 56: 37–66. Grierson A.G. (ed.). 1903. Tibeto Burman Family. Volume 3. Linguistic Survey of India. Government Printing Office. Guha, A. 1991. Medieval and Early Colonial Assam: Society, Polity, Economy. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi and Company. Gundevia Y.D. 1975. War and Peace in Nagaland. Dehradun: Palit & Palit. Gurdon, P.R. T. 1914. The Khasis. Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam. Hann, C. 2007. ‘The Anthropology of Christianity per se’, Arch.eurp.sociol. XLVIII(3): 383–410. http://journals.cambridge.org. Hann, C. and H. Goltz. 2010. ‘Introduction: The Other Christianity?’ in C. Hann and H. Goltz (eds) Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–29. Haokip, S. 2001. ‘Identity, Conflict and Nationalism: The Naga and Kuki Peoples of Northeast India and Northwest Burma (Myanmar)’. Ph.D. dissertation. Liverpool: University of Liverpool. Ham, P. van, and J. Saul. 2008. Expedition Naga: Diaries from the Hills in Northeast India 1921–1937 and 2002–2003. Antique Collectors’ Club. Haralu. 1933. ‘Angami–English Dictionary, Part I’, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal 29: 117–57. Hartwig, W. 1970. Wirtschaft und gesellschaftsstruktur der Naga. Berlin: AkademieVerlag. Hefner, R.W. (ed.). 1993. Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herdt, G. 1987. ‘Selfhood and Discourse in Sambia Dream Sharing’, in B. Tedlock (ed.) Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hilaly, S. 2007. The Railways in Assam, 1885–1947. Varanasi: Pilgrims Publishing. Hodson, T.C. 1911. The Naga Tribes of Manipur. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. Holy, L. 1992. ‘Beiti Dream Interpretation’, in M. Jedrej and R. Shaw (eds) Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa. Leiden: Brill. Hoppál, M. and O. Sadovszky. 1989. Shamanism: Past and Present. Budapest and Los Angeles: Ethnographic Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences & International Society for Trans-Oceanic Research. Horam, M. 1975. Naga Polity. New Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation. ———. 1977. Social and Cultural Life of Nagas (Tangkhul Nagas). New Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation. ———. 1988. Nagas: Old Ways and New Trends. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications. ———. 1988. Naga Insurgency: The Last Thirty Years. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

278 Bibliography

Horton, E. 1971. ‘African Conversion’, Africa XLI: 85–108. Hoskins, J. 1987. ‘Entering the Bitter House: Spirit Worship and Conversion in West Sumba’, in R. S. Kipp and S. Rodgers (eds) Indonesian Religions in Transition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Howell, S. (ed.). 1996. For the Sake of our Future: Sacrificing in Eastern Indonesia. London: Research School, CNWS. Huber, M.T. 1988. The Bishops’ Progress: A Historical Ethnography of Catholic Missionary Experience on the Sepik Frontier. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hubert, H. and M. Mauss. (1903) 1981. Sacrifice. Trans. W.D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hugh-Jones, S. 1979. The Palm and the Pleiades: Initiation and Cosmology in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humphrey, C. and J. Laidlaw. 1994. Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hunter, W.W. 1879. ‘Statistical Account of Naga Hills’, in A Statistical Account of Assam. Vol. II. London: Trübner & Co. ———. 1881. Gazetteer of Assam. Calcutta. ———. 1882. Assam Administrative Report. Calcutta. Hutton, J.H. 1917–35. ‘Tour Diaries of Naga Hills’, typescript, Hutton Ms. B 2. Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum Archives. ——— 1921a. The Angami Nagas. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. ——— 1921b. The Sema Nagas. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. ——— 1921c. ‘Leopard-men in Naga Hills’, in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. ———. 1922. ‘The Meaning and Method of the Erection of Monoliths by the Naga Tribes’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 52: 242–49. ———. 1926 The Use of Stone in the Naga Hills. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 56: 71–82. ———. 1928. ‘The Significance of Head-hunting in Assam’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 58: 399–408. ———. 1929. ‘Diaries of Two Tours in the Unadministered Area East of the Naga Hills’, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 11(1): 1–72. ———. 1945. ‘Problems of Reconstruction in the Assam Hills’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 65: 1–7. ———. 1946. Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origins. Cambridge: The University Press. ——— 1963. ‘Lycanthropy’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 14. Chicago and London: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Company. ———. 1965. ‘The Mixed Culture of the Naga Tribes’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 95: 16–43. ———. 1969. The Angami Nagas, 2nd edn. Bombay: Oxford University Press. International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and Macro International. 2009. National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), India, 2005–06: Nagaland. Mumbai: IIPS. Retrieved 10 August 2011 from www.nfhsindia.org. Iralu, E. 2003. A Naga Village Remembered. Kohima: Ura Academy. ———. 2007. A Terrible Matriarchy. New Delhi: Zubaan. Iralu, K.D. 2000. Nagaland and India: The Blood and the Tears. Kohima: Publisher Unknown.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 279

IWGIA. 1986. The Naga Nation and its Struggle against Genocide. Document 56. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. ———. 1998. The Indigenous World 1997–98. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. Jacobs, J. et al. 1990. The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India. London: Thames and Hudson. James, W. 1997. ‘Placing the Unborn: On the Social Construction of New Life’. Typescript. The Kanberry Lecture. Oxford: Centre for Cross Cultural Research on Women, QEH. James, W. and D. Johnson 1988. Vernacular Christianity: Essays in the Social Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: JASO. Jamir, T. 2006. ‘A Burial Site at Jotsoma and the Mortuary Custom of the Angami Naga: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach’, in G. Sengupta, S. Roychoudhury and S. Som (eds) Past and Present: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach. New Delhi: Pragati Publications. Jashetha. 1896. ‘Naga Head-taking Genna’. Typescript. J.H. Hutton papers. Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum Archives. Jenkins, F. Report no. 309 of 1853 on Relations with Hill Tribes on the Assam Frontier. Report on the Province of Assam, 1854. Calcutta. Jenkins, T. 1999. Religion in English Everyday Life. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Johnstone, J. 1896. My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills. London. Joshi, V. 1985–86. ‘Medical Pluralism and Curative Practices in a Village in Nagaland’. M.Sc. dissertation. Delhi: Delhi University. ———. 1986. ‘Health, Disease and Social Structure: Their Relationship in a Nagaland Village’, Indian Anthropologist 16. ———. 1989. ‘Healing and Religion in Northeast India’. M.Phil. dissertation. Oxford: Oxford University. ———. 1992. ‘Healing Practices of Angami Nagas and the Festival of Sekrenyi’. Project Report. Janpada Sampada, IGNCA, New Delhi. ———. 1990. ‘Medicine, Church and Colonial Administration in Nagaland’, Eastern Anthropologist 43(4). ———. (Patel). 1994a. ‘A Pledge for Peace’, The India Magazine (April issue): 32–41. ——— (Patel). 1994b. ‘Shamans of Nagaland’, The India Magazine (May issue): 18–27. Joshi, Vibha. 2001. ‘Christian and Non-Christian Angami Naga: With Special Reference to Traditional Healing Practices’. D.Phil. dissertation. Oxford: Oxford University. ———. 2003. ‘Design, Meaning and Identity in Naga Textiles: Continuity and Change’, in E. Dell and S. Dudley (eds) Textiles from Burma. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, pp. 115–24. ———. 2004. ‘Human and Spiritual Agency in Angami Healing Part I & Part II’, Anthropology and Medicine 11(3): 269–91. ———. 2006. ‘A Different Beat’, India Today Travel Plus: Explore India, A Journey Through the East (January issue): 201–3. ———. 2007a. ‘The Birth of Christian Enthusiasm among the Angami in Nagaland’, in Erik de Maaker and Vibha Joshi (eds) Northeast and Beyond: Region and Change, special issue, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies XXX(3): 541–57.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

280 Bibliography

———. 2007b. ‘Redefining Status and Identity: The Case of Naga Textiles’, in J. Purunanda (ed.) Status, Myth and Supernatural: Unravelling the Secrets of Southeast Asian Textiles. The James H.W. Thompson Foundation Symposium Papers. Bangkok: River Books, pp. 108–21. ———. 2008a. ‘Pluralistic Beliefs: Christianity and Healing among the Angami Naga’, in Michael Oppitiz et al. (eds) Naga Identities. Gent: Snoeck Publishers: 393–402. ———. 2008b. ‘The Naga: An Introduction’, in R. Kunz and V. Joshi (eds) Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag and Museum der Kulturen Basel, pp. 37–47. ———. 2008c. ‘Feasts and Festivals, Hornbill Festival’, in R. Kunz and V. Joshi (eds) Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag and Museum der Kulturen Basel, pp. 148–55. ———. 2008d. ‘Women in Naga Society’, in R. Kunz and V. Joshi (eds) Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag and Museum der Kulturen Basel, pp. 89–93. ———. 2010. ‘Nagaland and Nagas of Manipur’, in J. Dhamija (ed.) Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion, volume South Asia and Southeast Asia. Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp. 205–11. ———. Forthcoming. ‘The Micro-politics of Borders: The Issue of Greater Nagaland (Nagalim)’, in D. Gellner (ed.) Borderlands in South Asia: Beyond State and Nation. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Kabui, G. 1996. ‘Origin of the Nagas’, in R. Vashum, A. Iheilung et.al. (eds) Nagas at Work. New Delhi: NSUD Publication. Kamei, G. 2004. A History of the Zeliangrong Nagas: From Makhel to Rani Gaidinliu. Guwahati: Spectrum Publications. Kammerer, C.A. 1989. Customs and Christian Conversion among Akha Highlanders of Burma and Thailand, American Ethnologist 17(2): 277–91. Katz, M. 1928. ‘Genna in South-eastern Asia’, American Anthropologist 30: 580–601. Kauffmann, H.E. 1935. ‘Landwirtschaft bei den bergvölkern von Assam und NordBurma’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 66: 15–111. ———. 1938. ‘Das weben in den Naga-Bergen (Assam)’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 69: 113–35. ———. 1939. ‘Kurze ethnographie der nördlichen Sangtam-Naga (Lophomi), Assam’, Anthropos 34: 207–45. ———. 1943. ‘The Thread-Square Symbol of the Nagas of Assam’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 73(1/2): 101–6. ———. 1944. ‘Deutsche Naga-Hills-Expedition’, Ethnologischer Anzeiger 4: 162–67, 224–35, 318–36. ———. 1953. ‘Reisspeicher der Naga’, Anthropos 48: 634–36. Keane, W. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom & Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keitzar, R. 1987. Triumph of Faith in Nagaland. Kohima: Nagaland Baptist Church Council. Kendall, L. 1988. ‘Healing Thyself: A Korean Shaman’s Afflictions’, Social Science and Medicine 27(15): 445–50. Kevichusa, K. 2010. ‘Forgiveness in the Absence of Justice and Reconciliation: An Ethical Exploration with Special Reference to the Issue of Naga Political Murders’,

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 281

in Frampton F. Fox (ed.) Violence and Peace: Creating a Culture of Peace in the Contemporary Context of Violence. Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, pp. 1–26. Kikon, D. 2005. ‘Operation Hornbill Festival 2004’, in Gateway to the East: A Symposium on Northeast India and the Look East Policy. India Seminar 550. Retrieved 25 April 2006 from www.india-seminar.com. Kire, E. 2010. Mari. India: Harper Collins. ———. 2011. Bitter Wormwood. New Delhi, India: Zubaan. Kirkwood, N. 1997. ‘Independent India’s Troubled Northeast’. SAAR, Queensland, Australians in Asia series 17. Kirsch, T.A. 1973. Feasting and Social Oscillation: Religion and Society in Upland Southeast Asia. New York: Cornell University Press. Kleinman, A. 1980. Patient and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderline between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Konyak, A.Y. 1986. From Darkness to Light. Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre. Kunz, R. 2008. ‘Log-drums – Ceremonial Objects of the Central and Northern Nagas’, in R. Kunz and V. Joshi (eds) Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag and Museum der Kulturen Basel, pp. 58–60. Kunz, R. and V. Joshi (eds). 2008. Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag and Museum der Kulturen Basel. Kuolie, D. 2006. Structural Description of Tenyidie: A Tibeto-Burman Language of Nagaland. Kohima: Ura Academy Publications Division. Laderman, C. 1983. Wives and Midwives: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural Malaysia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lalswema. 1964. ‘The Work of the Holy Spirit and Tribal Religious Emotionalism: An Interpretation on Christian Experience of the Work of the Holy Spirit in Relation to some Theological Concepts and Practices among Tribal Christian Congregations in Assam from 1946–1958’. M.Th. dissertation. Jabalpur: Leonard Theological College. Lan, D. 1985. Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. London: James Curry. Last, M. 2000. ‘Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria’, in V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele and P. Reynolds (eds) Violence and subjectivity. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Leach, E.R. 1950. ‘Time Reckoning in Oceania’, Oceania 20: 245–62. ———. 1968. ‘Ritual’, in D.S. Sill (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. London: Macmillan & Co. and The Free Press. ———. 1976. Culture & Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, I.M. 1989. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. London: Routledge. Leys, N. 1926. Kenya. London: Hogarth Press. Lienhardt, R.G. 1961. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Linyü, K. 2004. Christian Movements in Nagaland. Kohima: N.V. Press. Littlewood, R. and M. Lipsedge. [1982] 1989. Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry. Unwin Hyman. Lock, M. 1993. ‘Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge’, Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 133–200.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

282 Bibliography

Longchar, T. 2009. ‘Conflicts in the Process of Transition from Traditional Society to Modernity: A Case Study on the Role of the Church amongst the Naga Tribe of South East Asia’. Ph.D. dissertation. Dublin: Trinity College. Longkumer, A. 2007. ‘Religious and Economic Reform: The Gaidinliu Movement and the Heraka in the North Cachar Hills’, in E. de Maaker and V. Joshi (eds) Northeast and Beyond: Region and Change, special issue, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies XXX(3): 499–515. ———. 2010. Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging: The Heraka Movement in Northeast India. London: Continuum. Lotha, A. 2007. History of Naga Anthropology (1832–1947). Dimapur: Chumpo Museum. ———. 2009. ‘Articulating Naga Nationalism’. Ph.D. dissertation. New York: The City University of New York, Faculty of Anthropology. UMI Number: 3379221. Luen, M.I. 2009. The Fire of Revival. Secundrabad: Authentic Books, Biblica South Asia. Luithui, L. and N. Haksar. 1984. Nagaland File: A Question of Human Rights. New Delhi: Lancer International. Lumsdaine, D.H. (ed.). 2009. Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCabe, R.B. 1887. Outline Grammar of the Angami Naga Language: With Vocabulary and Illustrative Sentences. Calcutta. Macdonald, A. 1975. Essays on the Ethnology of Nepal and South Asia. Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandhar. McDonaugh, C.E.J.S. 1978. ‘A Study of Ritual Homicide and Warfare among the Naga Tribes on the Indo-Burma Border’. M.Litt. dissertation. Oxford: Oxford University. Macfarlane, A. 1990. ‘The Cambridge Experimental Videodisc Project’, Anthropology Today 6(1): 9–12. Mackenzie, A. 1884. A History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the Northeastern Frontier of Bengal. Calcutta. Mankekar, D.R. 1967. On the Slippery Slope in Nagaland. Bombay: Manaktalas. Manchanda, R. 2004. ‘We do more because we can’: Naga Women in the Peace Process. Kathmandu: South Asian Forum for Human Rights. Retrieved 22 January 2010 from www.safhr.org. Mao, A.D. 1992. Nagas: Problem and Politics. New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House. Marrison, G.E. 1967. The Classification of Naga Languages of North-East India. Vols. I & II. Ph.D. thesis. London: University of London. Martin, K.J. (ed.). 2010. Indigenous Symbols and Practices in the Catholic Church. Visual Culture, Missionization and Appropriation. Surrey, England: Ashgate. Marwah, I.S. and V.K. Srivastava. 1987. ‘Khel Gate and Social Structure: A Study of their Relationship and a Note on the Place of Material Culture in Anthropology’, Indian Anthropologist 17(2). Matisoff, J.A. 1978. Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman: The ‘Organic’ Approach to Linguistic Comparison. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. ———. 1991. Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Present State and Future Prospects, Annual Review of Anthropology 20: 469–504. ———. 1999. The Sino-Tibetan Language Family. Retrieved 2 March 2001 from www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/lingdept/research/stedt/STfamily.html#names. Maxwell, N. 1980. India: The Nagas and the Northeast. London: Minority Rights Group.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 283

Metcalf, P. 1982. A Borneo Journey into Death. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Meyer, B. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. London: Edinburgh University Press. Mhasi, L.S. 1994. What are the Nagas Undergoing. Kohima. Miller, I.M. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mills, J.P. 1922. The Lhota Nagas. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. ———. 1926. The Ao Nagas. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. ———. 1935. ‘The Effect on the Tribes of Naga Hills District of Contacts with Civilization’, in Census of India 1931, vol. I, Part III, ethnographical, B. ethnographical notes, pp. 147–49. ———. 1937. The Rengma Nagas. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. Mosse, D. 1994. ‘Catholic Saints and the Hindu Village Pantheon in Rural Tamil Nadu, India’, Man 29: 301–32. ———. 1996. ‘South Indian Christians, Purity/Impurity and the Caste System: Death Ritual in a Tamil Roman Catholic Community’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 461–83. ———. 2006. ‘Possession and Confession. Affliction and Sacred Power in Colonial and Contemporary Catholic South India’, in F. Cannell (ed.) The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 99–133. Naga Database. www.alanmacfarlane.com. Nagaland State Human Development Report. 2004. Retrieved 12 May 2010 from http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/stateplan/sdr_pdf/shdr_Naga04.pdf. National Commission for Women. 2005. ‘The Impact of Armed Conflict on Women in the North East: Case Studies from Nagaland & Tripura’. Retrieved 20 July 2011 from http://ncw.nic.in/frmPubReport.aspx. Needham, R. 1950–51. ‘An Investigation into the Social Sanctions of the Naga Tribes of the Indo-Burman Border’. B.Litt. dissertation. Oxford: Oxford University. ———. 1971. ‘Penan Friendship Names’, in T. Beidelman (ed.) The Translation of Culture. New York: Tavistock. ———. 1976. ‘Skulls and Causality’, Man (N.S.) II: 71–88. Neikhrienyu, J.C. 2004. ‘The Spirituality of Angami Naga Women’, in P. Chand and B. Wood (eds) Tribes in Transition: Indian Christians Reflect on the Original Inhabitants of the Land. Bangalore: SAIACS, pp. 159–64. Ness, R.C. 1980. ‘The Impact of Indigenous Healing Activity: An Empirical Study of Two Fundamentalist Churches’, Social Science and Medicine 14: 167–409. Nibedan, N. 1978. Nagaland the Night of the Guerrillas. New Delhi: Lancers Publishers. ———. 1981. North East India: The Ethnic Explosion. New Delhi: Lancers Publishers. Nichter, M. 1989. Anthropology and International Health: South Asian Case Studies. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Norman, K. 2000. Phoning the Field: Meanings of Place and Involvement in Fieldwork ‘at Home’, in V. Amit (ed.) Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge. Nuh, V.K. 1996. A Theological Reflection on Naga Theology. Kohima: Council of Naga Baptist Churches. Nuh, V.K. (ed.). 1996. Crusade on Naga Morality. Kohima: Council of Naga Baptist Churches.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

284 Bibliography

Nuh, V.K. and W. Lasuh. 2002. Naga Chronicle. Indian Council of Social Science Research, North Eastern Regional Centre. New Delhi: Regency Publication. Oppitz, M. 2008. ‘The Logdrum’, in Michael Oppitiz et al. (eds) Naga Identities. Gent: Snoeck Publishers, pp. 169–97. Oppitz, M. et al. (eds). 2008. Naga Identities, Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoek Publishers. Orapankal, A. 1999. ‘The Roman Catholic Church in a Leadership Paradox: A Case Study of an Angami Parish in Nagaland, India’. Ph.D. dissertation. Fordham University, New York. UMI number: 9938914. Ovesen, J. 1983. ‘Man or Beast: Lycanthropy in the Naga Hills’, Ethnos 48(1–2): 5–25. Pachuau, L. 2002. Ethnic Identity and Christianity. A Socio-historical and Missiological Study of the Christianity in Northeast India with Special Reference to Mizoram. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Panger, I. 1993. Ancient Ao Naga Religion and Culture. New Delhi: Haranand Publications. Parkin, D.J. 1985. ‘Introduction’, in D.J. Parkin (ed.) The Anthropology of Evil. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1991. Sacred Void: Spatial Images of Work and Ritual among the Giriama of Kenya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. ‘Ritual as Spatial Direction and Bodily Division’, in D. de Coppett (ed.) Understanding Rituals. Routledge: London. ———. 1996. ‘Introduction: The Power of the Bizarre’, in D.J. Parkin, L. Caplan and H.J. Fisher (eds) The Politics of Cultural Performance. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Parkin, R. 1997. ‘Tree Marriage in India’, in K. Seeland (ed.) Nature is Culture: Indigenous Knowledge and Sociocultural Aspects of Trees and Forests in Non-European Cultures. London: Intermediate Technology Publications Ltd. Peacock, J. 1984. ‘Symbolic and Psychological Anthropology: The Case of Pentecostal Faith-healing’, Ethnos 12: 37–53. Peal, S.E. 1894. ‘Fading Histories’, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal 63(3): 10–20. Peel, J.D.Y. 1968. Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peseye, V.K. 2003. ‘Developing an Indigenous Hymnody for the Naga Baptist Churches of Northeast India with Special Reference to the Angami Church’. Ph.D. dissertation. Fort Worth, TX: School of Church Music, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. UMI number: 3108668. Peseyie, V.L. 2001. ‘Contextual Leadership Development of the Angami Church: A Case Study for Equipping Angami Leadership’. Ph.D. dissertation. Pasedena: School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary. UMI number: 3045285. Peseyie-Maase, V.L. 2009. God’s Glory on Himalaya Mountains. USA: Xulon Press. Peters, L. 1981. Ecstasy and Healing in Nepal: An Ethnopsychiatric Study of Tamang Shamanism. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications. Philip, P.T. 1983. The Growth of Baptist Churches in Nagaland. Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre. Pienünuo, H. 1931. The First Gate into Angami and English. Kohima.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 285

Pink, S. 2000. ‘“Informants” who Come “Home”’, in V. Amit (ed.) Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge. Puthenpurakal, J. 1984. Baptists Mission in Nagaland: Historical and Ecumenical Perspective. Shillong: Vendrame Missiological Institute. Rafael, V. 1993. Contracting Colonialism:Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ranger, T. 1981. ‘Godly Medicine: The Ambiguities of Medical Mission in Southeastern Tanzania 1900–45’, Social Science and Medicine 15: 261–77. Ranger, T. (ed.). 2008. Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rao, O.M. 1980. Baptist Distinctives: With Special References to the Churches of the CBCNEI. Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre. ———. 1986. Longri Ao: A Biography. Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre. ———. 1994. Focus on Northeast Indian Christianity. Delhi: ISPCK. Raum, O.F. 1940. Chaga Childhood: A Description of Indigenous Education in an East African Tribe. London: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, and Oxford University Press. Ravindran, N. 1974. Angami Phonetic Reader. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. Reichel-Dalmatoff, G. 1975. The Shaman and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic Drugs among the Indians of Colombia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rivenburg, N. (ed.). 1941. The Star of the Naga Hills: Letters from Rev. Sidney & H. Rivenburg, Pioneer Missionaries in Assam, 1883–1923. Philadelphia: American Baptist Press. Rivenburg, S.W. 1905. Phrases in English and Angami Naga. Kohima. Rivers, W.H.R. 1910. ‘The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry’, The Sociological Review 3: 1–12. Robbins, J. 2003. ‘What is a Christian? Notes towards an Anthropology of Christianity’, Religion 33(3): 191–99. ———. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: California University Press. ———. 2006. ‘Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship?’ Anthropological Quarterly 79(2): 285–94. Ross, R. 1902. ‘Researches on Malaria’. Nobel Lecture, 12 December, pp. 26–116. Rustomji, N. 1983. Imperilled Frontiers: India’s Northeastern Borderlands. Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sakhrie, A. 2006. ‘The Vision of T. Sakhrie for a Naga Nation’. Kohima: President Lievüse Clan. Sanyü, V. 1996. A History of Nagas and Nagaland: Dynamics of Oral Tradition in Village Formation. New Delhi: Commonwealth Publications. ———. 2010. ‘Indo-Naga Conflict: A Role for Indigenous Spirituality and Oral Tradition in the Naga Peace Process’. Typescript. Sardeshpande, S.C. 1987. The Patkoi Nagas. Delhi: Daya Publishing House. Saul, J. and D. Viallard. 2005. The Naga of Burma: Their Festivals, Customs and Way of Life. Bangkok: Orchid Press. Schreiter, R.J. 1985. Constructing Local Theologies. London: SCM Press. Sekhose, M. 1986. English-Angami: Self Taught. Kohima: Peak Agency. Sekhose, R. 1984. Angami Dictionary with English Equivalent Words. Kohima.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

286 Bibliography

Sema, H. 1986. Emergence of Nagaland: Socio-economic and Political Transformation and the Future. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. Serto, T. 1986. The Last Missionary of American Baptist Churches in Northeast India. Imphal. Shakespear, L.W. 1913. Military Report on the Naga Hills. Shimla. ———. 1914. History of Upper Assam, Upper Burmah, and Northeastern Frontier. London: Macmillan. Shore, M. 2009. Religion and Conflict Resolution: Christianity and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Surrey: Ashgate. Shorter, A. 1988. Toward a Theology of Inculturation. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Shürhozelie, L. 1981. Phousanyi. Kohima: Ura Academy. ———. 1996. ‘Welcome Speech’, in V.K. Nuh (ed.) Crusade on Naga Morality. Kohima: Council of Naga Baptist Churches. Singh, K.S. 1994. The Scheduled Tribes. People of India, national series vol. III. Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India, and Oxford University Press. Singh, K.S, N.K. Das and C.L. Imechen. 1994. Nagaland. Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India. Singh, P. [1972] 1995. Nagaland. New Delhi: National Book Trust. Singha, R. 2011. ‘The Recruiter’s Eye on “the Primitive”’, in J.E. Kilchen, A. Miller and L. Rowe (eds) Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 193–217. Smilde, D. 2007. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, W.C. 1923. ‘Missionary Activities and the Acculturation of Backward Peoples’, Journal of Applied Sociology vii: 175–86. ———. 1925. The Ao Naga Tribe of Assam: A Study in Ethnology and Sociology. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. Snyder, K.A. 1997. ‘Elders’ Authority and Women’s Protest: The Masay Ritual and Social Change among the Iraqw of Tanzania’, JRAI 3(3): 561–76. Spiro, M.E. 1967. Burmese Supernaturalism: A Study in the Explanation and Reduction of Suffering. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Srivastava, V.K. 1992. ‘Should Anthropologists Pay their Respondents?’, Anthropology Today 8(6): 16–20. Steedley, M.M. 1988. ‘Severing the Bonds of Love: A Case Study in Soul Loss’, Social Science and Medicine 27: 841–56. Stirn, A. and P. van Ham. 2003. The Hidden World of the Naga. Living Traditions in Northeast India and Burma. Munich: Prestel. Sundar, N. 2011. ‘Interning Insurgent Populations: The Buried Histories of Indian Democracy’. Economic & Political Weekly XLVI(6): 47–57. Retrieved 10 March 2011 from http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/15684.pdf. Sundquist, J.A. 1999. ‘Mission Done Right’. Valley Forge: American Baptist Churches. Retrieved 5 August 2000 from www.angelfire.com/mo/Nagaland/ABC.html. Supplee, G.W. 1930. Kephrüda keriau – First Reader in Angami Naga. Kohima. Sutter, R. 2008. ‘Shadows and Tigers: Concepts of Soul and Tiger-man’, in M. Oppitz et al. (eds) Naga Identities, Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoek Publishers. Sutton, D.E. 1997. ‘The Vegetarian Anthropologist’, Anthropology Today 13(1): 5–8. Swinson, A. 1966. Kohima. London: Cassell.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bibliography 287

Syiemlieh, D.R. 1990. A Brief History of the Catholic Church in Nagaland. Shillong: Vendrame Missiological Institute. Tanquist, J.E. 1927. ‘The Calendar of Angami Nagas’, Man in India VII: 263–76. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tedlock, B. (ed.). 1987. Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tenyimia Union. 1996. Souvenir Special Issue: Ta Amara fu Chitebu. Kohima: Tenyimia Union. Terhüja, K. 1972. ‘The Christian Church among Angami Nagas’, in K.S. Singh (ed.) Tribal Situations in India. Shimla: Advanced Institute. ———. 1996. ‘The Biblical Concept of the Anointed One’, in V.K. Nuh (ed.) Crusade on Naga Morality. Kohima: Council of Naga Baptist Churches, pp. 20–25. Thomas, N. and C. Humphrey (eds). 1994. Shamanism, History, and the State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thornton, R.J. 1980. Space, Time and Culture among the Iraqw of Tanzania. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1982. ‘Modelling Spatial Relations in a Boundary-making Ritual of the Iraqw of Tanzania’, Man 17: 528–45. Tomlinson, M. 2009. In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Rituals. New York: Cornell University Press. Upadhyaya, R. 2005. ‘Naga Insurgency – A Confusion of War or Peace’. Retrieved 6 September 2010 from www.southasiaanalysis.org. Valentine, P. 1974. ‘A Reanalysis of the Political Groupings of Naga Tribes’. B.Litt. dissertation. Oxford: Oxford University. Vashum, R. 2000. Naga’s Right to Self Determination: An Anthropological Historical Perspective. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. Vashum, R., A. Iheilung, et al. 1996. Nagas at Work. Delhi: Naga Students’ Union Delhi. Veer, P. van der (ed.). 1996. Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. New York and London: Routledge. Victor, A. 1996. ‘Language Loss, Social Change and Language Planning in Nagaland: A Humanistic Ecological Speculation’, in R. Vashum, A. Iheilung, et al. (eds) Nagas at Work. Delhi: Naga Students’ Union, Delhi. Viswanathan, S. (1993) 2010. The Christians of Kerela: History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Wati, I.B. 2009. Memoirs: My Early Years in Nagaland 1920–1935. English translation of Impur Chano 1920–1935 by C. Aier. Guwahati: Council of Baptist Churches in North East India, and Board of International Ministries, ABC-USA. Webster, H. 1916. Rest Days: A Study in Early Law and Morality. New York: The Macmillan Company. Wessing, R. 1986. The Soul of Ambiguity: The Tiger in Southeast Asia. Monograph series on Southeast Asia 24. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies. West, A. 1984. ‘Costume and Status among the Nagas’. MA dissertation. Hull: University of Hull.

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

288 Bibliography

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

———.1992. ‘The Nagas in the Museum: An Anthropological Study of the Material Culture of the Hill Peoples of the Assam-Burma Border’. PhD Thesis: University of Hull. ———. 1999. ‘The Most Dangerous Legacy: The Development of Identity, Power and Marginality in the British Transfer to India and the Nagas’, Occasional Paper 34. Hull: University of Hull, Centre for South-East Asian Studies. ———.2011. Museums, Colonialism and Identity: A History of Naga Collections in Britain. London: The Horniman Museum and Gardens. Whiteman, D.L. 1985. ‘Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Cultural Change’, Studies in Thirld World Societies 25. Williamsburg: Department of Anthropology. Woodthorpe, R.G. 1975–76. ‘Naga Hills Exploration: Report on the Survey Operations in the Naga Hills, 1875–76’, in General Report of the Topographical Surveys of India. ———. 1882. ‘Notes on the Wild Tribes Inhabiting the so-called Naga Hills on our Northeast Frontier of India’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute XI: 56–72, 196– 212. Yonuo, A. 1974. The Rising Nagas: A Historical and Political Study. Delhi: Vivek Publishing House. ———. 1982. Naga Struggle Against the British Rule Under Jadonang and Rani Gaidinliu, 1925–1947. Kohima: Leno Printing Press. Zou, D.V. 2005. ‘Raiding the Dreaded Past: Representations of Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in Northeast India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 39(1): 75–105. Letters (and Reports) of the American Baptist Historical Society Archives. American Baptist Church Centre, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (now in Atlanta, GA): Clark, E.W. 1872–1911 Bailey, J.R. 1910–1928 King, C.D. 1878–1895 Rivenburg, S. 1885–1923 Robbins 1922 Supplee, G.W. 1921–1949 Angami Baptist Church Council archives, ABCC Offices, Mission Compound, Kohima, Nagaland, India: Mission Newsletters in Tenyidie and English: Khwhira Dielie 1932–1939 Kohima Mission Leshü 1940–1947 Angami Mission Leshü 1968–1969 Angami Mission Dielie 1970–2011

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

INDEX

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A age-set, xxvii, xxviii, 34, 40–42, 49, 99, 106, 108, 112, 114–16, 196, 256n8, see also ki-kra-mia; pelie-kro ainkishi, 246n28 akhru, 90 aksü, 246n28 Alemrenba, S., 246n28 Allen, B.C., 22 allopathic medicine, 152, 156, 230 alternative therapy, 230–31 American Baptist International Ministry, 250 American Baptist mission/missionary, 67,159, 203, 208, 217, 218 and the Angami Naga mission, 178 and the Ao Naga, 163, 177, 183, 185–86 Bible translation and, 67, 172–74 British officers and, 167, 182 and Burma mission, 160 conference, 177 and the disbanding of church, 183 dispensary, 177–78 and education, 160, 166, 168 expulsion from Naga Hills, 189 Home Board, 159–60, 164, 168–69 in Kohima, 164–65 Kohima mission, 173 letters, 159, 164–66, 168–70, 183, 185 list of, 167 medical missionary, 177–78 and medicine, 160, 174, 176–78 see also Clark, Edward; Clark, Mary; King, Charles D.; Rivenburg Angami Bible, 191n8 customary law, 57 eschatology, 90 lineage, 35, 52

and medical evangelism, 178 origin and migration, 32–33 pantheon, 51–52 rebellion, 23, 164 ritual terms, 83–84 village, 38 Angami Baptist Church Council, 190n4, 190n7 125 year celebration, 218 Bible Seminary, 201 centenary monolith, 219 Kohima mission newsletters, 190n4, see also Angami Mission Delie; Kewhira Dielie women’s group, 237 Angami Mission Delie, 190n7 angel(s), xxviii, 56, 139, 150, 235 anghuu-kuhulhomi, 79n20 angshu amiki, 79n20 animism, 2, 9, 12–13, 25, 59, 81, 83, 116, 123, 170, 203, 247, 255 animists, 2, 3, 51, 53, see also Krüna, Tsanamia, pfutsana anitsutekhru, 120n43 Ao, Longri, 25, 223, 244n2, 249, 265 and Billy Graham crusade, 223–24 and evangelistic crusades, 223 Nagaland Missionary Movement and, 223 peace talks and, 223, 249 Ao, Temsula, 260 apfutsutekhru, 120n43 a-phou, 71 Archer, Mildred, 27, 47n27 Assam Rifles, xix, xxii, 78, 114, 119n31, 256n10 Assembly of God, 198, 199, 216, 217, 241 atheists, 170 Ayurvedic medicine, 149, 156, 230–31

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

290 Index

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

B ba, 115 bado, 112, 115 Bailey, J.R., 167, 177, 189, 192n24 Balfour, Henry, 26, 47n23, 74, 264 Baptist church, xxiin9, 13n2, 118, 184, 194, 197, 206, 209–10, 215, 217–18, 228 building, 206 centenary celebration, 217–18 commemorative monolith, 218–19 faith healing and, 230, 242 opposition to revival church, 199 quasiquicentennial (125 years), 217, 222n24 reconciliation and, 241, 244, 246n28 Baptist Revival church, 212 bara-khana, 219, see also Christmas basa-khel, 181 Battle of Kohima, see World Wars Beidelman, Thomas, 266n5n6 Bible, 153, 202, 214, 218 classes for children, 208, 222n20 New Testament in Angami, 172–73 teaching of, 171 in Tenyidie, 191n8 translation of, 67–70, 172 Billy Graham, 223–34, 248 biomedicine, 13, 51, 97, 123, 247, 248 Bowen, John, 76 Bowers, Alva, 163 burunjia, 29 Butler, Captain John, 21, 22–23, 45n4, 163, 262 British annexation, 15, 159, 166 East India Company, 19, 161 head quarters, 21 protection of Naga villages, 20 punitive expedition, 20, 22 survey expedition, 21–22 and trade, 20 British officers letters, 159 and tea cultivation, 159–61 Bronson, Reverend, 160–62, 190n1, 262 Bruce, Charles, 160 Burma, 15, 19, 20, 26, 27, 29, 160, 182, 202, 260 Buxton, Jean, 118n7

C calendar, 104–5, 269 Angami, see khrü-phrü Gregorian, see leshü khrü-phrü calha, 62 Cantlie, Keith, 254, 256–57 carhie, 112, 116

casie, 62 Catholic, and burying of holy medals, 194 church service, 210–11 first Angami priest, 207 Kohima cathedral, 195–96, 211, 221n5 medical sisters, 194, 231 mission in Kohima, 194 missionaries, 189 nun(s), 204, 207 opposition from the Baptist church, 194 primary healthcare training, 231 schools, 195 Chikeo, 60 childbirth, 86, see also penuo naming a newborn, 64–65 rituals, see nuobou nanyü Chinai, Rupa, 118n10, 157n15, 245n16 Chitebo tree, xviii, 33–34, 267 Chiyongsem, 246n28 Christian, 150 born-again, 224 discipline, 181 education, 168–69 first village/settlement, 181 healing camps, 224 healing crusades, 189 healing festivals, 241–42 healing spirit, 247 landscape, 204–5 nominal, 189 revival, 189, 197, 224 students, 171 theology, study of, 201–2 way of living, 183 Christianity and American Baptist Mission, 12, 159 anthropology of, 6–7 and backsliding, 9 baptism,184 in Burma (Myanmar), 202 contemporary, 13, 193 conversion, 159, 185, 189, 200–1 and drinking of rice beer, 9–10 in families, 203 first converts, 181 forgiveness and, 13 and history of evangelization in Naga Hills, 159 and modernity, 5, 7 and no work days, 85 quasiquicentennial (125 years), 249, see also Baptist church and socio-cultural changes, 185–88 reconciliation and, 13 and revival, 10

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Index 291

and rupture, 8–9 see also education Christmas, 2, 209–10, 219–20 chü, 73 chü-kemesa, 92 Chükheo, 60, 77 Chükrü fruit, 111 chuti-tho, 111 chü whuo phra, 111–12 chüzanhie, 107 church, 145 building, 204–6 changing affiliation, 216–17 choir, 208, 218 communal celebrations, 217–20 and drug rehabilitation, 232 and healers, 145–46 healing, 214, 223 offices, 206–7 peace talks, 223 prayer group, 145, 212 and prophecy, 216 service, 207–9 clan, see thino sub-clan, see putsano Clark, Edward, 162–65, 171, 175, 183–85 Clark, Mary, 103, 162, 174, 185, 187, 262 cloistering, 82, 83, see also penyü; rüsorüchümo Csordas, Thomas, 7, 14n3

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

D dai, 87 Damant, G.H. 23, 164, 262 damoge, 100–101 dao, 62, 92, 93, 98, 102, 211 daru-kesi-mia, 144, 238 Das, Nava Kishore, 31, 49n57 Davis, A.W., 102–3 dead souls of the, 138 world of the, 55 see also gadzüsi; Mecümo; Meichimo death(s), see kesia bad, 176, see also kesia-suo burial, 90–94, 95–96, see also akhru; mekhru; senyü in childbirth, 94, see also metsü-sia by drowning, 60 by fire, 94, see also mi-se god of, 61 rituals, 90–96 sound of crying babies, portends, 62 in war, see terhü-se derochü, 97 devil, 56, 69, 79n23, 92, 245n19

devil worship, 51 die, 73 dierochü, 73 disease aetiology, 52, 71, 77, 177, 249 divination, 56, 98, 100, 119n25, 123, 129–32 divinational healers, 123–25, 134, 137, 142 with plant stem, see thuophi with rice, see keyhuo themu-mia, xxviii, 125–37 diviner/s, 55, 61, 97–98 dobashi, 42, 190n3 Downs, Frederick, 85, 181, 197, 222n23 dreams bad, 100 and divination, 130 and non-divinational healers, 145–46 and themu-mia, 127, 129 see also mho Driem, George van, 43 drug abuse, 157n14, 240 dziethou, 74 Dzüdu mikhu, 78 Dzürawu, 60 Dzüruopfü, 60 dzü seva, 108, 112 dzütse, 94

E Easter, 219 Eaton, Richard, 68, 79n24 education, 162 Bible classes, 165 and British Officers, 182 (closure of) Christian schools, 166 and evangelization, 165, 168–69 government school, 190n4 high school, 169–71 language of instruction, 171–72 mission school, 190n4 and the Naga, 169 primary schools, 165, 169 and Second World War experience, 173 secular education, 166, 169 theology colleges, 201–2 Eliade, Mercia, 123 Elwin, Verrier, 28, 262 epidemic, 62, see also thepe-thero; thepe-thesa influenza, 103 rituals for, 102–3 smallpox, 102–3, 174 evangelism among the Angami, 178 and education, 165–71 and medical care, 174, 177–78 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 53, 118n7

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

292 Index

F faith healing, 215, 220, 233–34 feast of merit, 56, 83, 94, see also zhatho Fernandes, Sujatha, 13n2 Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR), 250 forgiveness and, 252–53 Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 26, 84, 259, 263

G gadzüsi, seeds of, 61, 93 Gaidinliu, Rani, 25 gaka, 100 gaonbura, 42, 190n3 genna, 84–85, see also kenyü; penyü; thenyi Gennep, Arnold van, 86 ghost, see temi Giridhar, Puttushetra, 43, 49, 78, 80 God, 68–69 god of the tigers, see Tekhu-ruo Godhula, Brown, 163, 174–75 Goltz, Hermann, 9 goodluck, see the-ruo-kevi Guha, Amalendu, 19 guo-dzü, 94

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

H Haggard, F., 166, 167, 185 Hann, Chris, 6, 9 headache, 100 headhunting, xv, 15, 19–20, 23, 30, 46n6, 46n10, 47n23, 59, 71, 75, 76, 81, 119n28, 161, 254, 262 healers, see themu-mia; daru-kesi-mia and Christianity, 133, 145–47 divinational, 123–25 herbalists, 97 list of, 126 non-divinational, 123 and missionaries, 177 see also dreams; zevi healing community, 227–29, see also Christian crusades; camps; festivals as a gift (from god), 146–47 Healing and Reconciliation Movement, 251 laying on of hands, 223, 224, 227 methods, 149–50 through prayer, 223, 227–28 see also faith healing; pranic heathen, 53, 183–84, 191n17 Hefner, Robert, 159 Heraka, 25 herbalists, 144–53 herbal medicine, 145

Hiekha khwe-hou, 94 Hindu, 53 Holy Spirit, 146, 233, see also Kemesa Roupfü healers and, 153, 156 Revival church and, 146, 216 homeopathy, 152–53 Hornbill festival, 4–5, 259 Horton, Robin, 79n24 Hoskins, Janet, 118n5 Humphrey, Caroline, 123 Hunter, William Wilson, 20–22, 161 Hutton, John Henry, xvii, 25, 29, 31–32, 38, 43, 48, 52–53, 58–59, 61, 64, 66–69, 73, 77, 78n11, 79nn15–16, 79n20, 82, 84, 94, 97, 99, 103, 118n3, 119n16, 119n23, 120n42, 124–25, 130, 132, 142, 182, 186–88, 192n20, 263

I illness, 62 and Christian converts, 185 personal ritual for, 97 resulting from abduction of the soul, 101 Impur/impur, 177, 180, 181–82, 184 Indian security forces, xx, xxiin9, xxiin12, xxiv, 197, 201, 221n13, 224, 228, 249 Indigenous hymnody, 10 Indo-Naga war, 201 Iralu, Easterine, 261 Iralu, Kaka Dierhekolie, 254 Iralu, Niketu, 232, 242, 246n27

J Jadonang, Haipou, 25, 46n19 jadu, ¯ 87 James, Wendy, 10, 118n7 Jashetha, 121n50 Jenkins, Captain, 6, 20, 160–62 Jenkins, Timothy, 6 jhum, 38, 94, 111, 218 Jiesu-u, 56 Jihova, 68–69 Johnson, Douglas, 10 Johnstone, James, 162, 182

K Kauffmann, Hans Eberhard, 119n19, 259, 264 kechupfe, 72 kedopo, 245n13 kehcü, 72 kehcü-kenü, 72 kehcü-ki-kepfe, 207 Kehou-mia, xxvii, 3, 53 Kehu, 42 kejowakecü, 256n8

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Index 293

kekra, 235 Kekramia, xxiin4 kekuo, 235 kelhu, 34–35 Kemeguo-ruopfü, 61 kemelo, xxvii, 75, 93, 136, 199, 234, 237, 239 kemesa, xxvii, 55, 89, 98, 107, 131, 134 kemesa kikru, 89 Kemesa Ruopfü, 70, 233, see also Holy Spirit Kemesathopfüka, 56 kemoprü, 146 kemovo, xxvii, 94, 125–26, 136 Kemovo-tsü, 63 kenna, 84, see also kenyü kenoudi, 56 ke-nu-se-kuo, 107 kenyü, 83–84, 87–89, 94, 120n39, 143, 201 Kepenuo, 53 Kepenuopfü, 53, 68 kerhei, 65, 90 kerhu, 102 kerhupfüruo zhü, 99 kerhu ruopfü, 64 kerhu-terhuo-mia, 56, 99 kerucha, see kesia-suo keshi grass, 93 kesia, 90 kesia khrü, 140 kesia mero, 93 kesia meru, 90 kesia phou, 140 kesia-suo (sia-suo), 64, 90, 94–95 kesüdi/kes-kedi, 57 kethezie-kedzünya, 243 ketsü, 101 ketzie/keji-rhuo-mia, 55, 127–28, 133–34 Kevichusa, Kethoser, 252, 254 Kewhira Dielie, 190n4, 190n7 kewhü, 98, 108, 110 keyhuo, 129 kezevikelie, 256n8 kezikevi, 243, 256n8 khao-un, 79n20 kharu, 36, 37, 49n55, 81 kharu-rhuo, 61 kharu-sie, 62, 89, 94 khel, 22, 35, 61–62, 81, 99, 120n39, 136, 203 Khezakenoma, 32–34, 104, 105 Khonoma village, 59–60, 64, 87–88, 95, 98, 210 age-set, 49n56 rebellion, 23–24, 46n13–15 Public Commission, 242 Rüffüno village council, 242 khophi, 78n12, 114, 120n47 khorha, 143–44

khorha bie-kelie-mia, 143 khrei, 108, 142 khrü, 65, 140 khrümvü, 65 khrü-phrü, 104, appendix 3 Khunuo penyü, 78n10 khuzu-mae-rü, 79n20 kichüki, 39 Kidima, 35 Kigwema, 40, 64, 66, 92, 105 kike, 229 ki-kra-mia, 99, 112, 115 ki-lo, 98, 108 King, Charles D., 164–65, 168, 178 kinoutshekou, 92 kiphouma, 202 Kire, Easterine, 47n27, 261, 266n2 kirupfezhe, 99 ki-ta-cie, 107, 108, 110 kita-cie, 109 kizie, 54, 92, 107, 120n36 Kohima, 31, 35, 64, 95–96, 167, 176 Civil Hospital, 145, 154, 194, 230 Mission High School, 170 Kohima Healing Festival, 241–42 Koza, 34 Krüna, 3, 82–83, 87, 97, 138, 144, 150, 201, 203 Krüna-mia, 52 kuchünebi, 100

L Lalswema, 197 language Angami, 172–73, 215, 217 English, 215, 217 Nagamese, 84, 215, 217 Tenyidie, 52, 79–80n26, 137 Tibeto-Burman, xv, 11, 29, 43, see also Driem use of Roman alphabet, 172 la-sia, 74 Last, Murray, 253 laying on of hands, see healing Leach, Edmund, 11, 86 leda, 111 leshü khrü-phrü, 104 letsa, 111 Leys, Norman, 266n6 Lhoulienyü, 172 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 86 lie-thou-mia, 207, 226, see also Pentecostal church life, see kerhei lineage, 35, 52 Linyü, Keviyiekielie, 191n18, 245n19

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

294 Index

live, see rhei lohe, 95, 108 lohra-mhoshü, 55, 108, 196, 222n18 Longchar, Toshinaro, 251, 256n2 Longkumer, Arkotong, 261 lotseihou, 93 Luen, M.I., 224 luo, 72, 150 luo-rudi, 74

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

M Mackenzie, Alexander, 23–24 massage, 145 masseurs, 144–56 Maveno, Maweno, Miagwene, 59 me-cü, 75 Mecümo, 60 medicine, 174, see also homeopathy, Ayurvedic and missionaries, 175–76 for smallpox, 174 medico-religious pluralism, 247 Meichimo, 60 mekhru, 90 mekrü-mia, xxiin4 mekwü, 92, 111, 120n44, 141 mepuo puo kecü uro kechü, 98 mesa-te, 89 Metsimo, 78n11 mevo, 237 mha-metha, 110 mhonyü, 76 mhosho, 243 mhoshü-gaka, 100 mho-suo, 76 mho-suo nanyü, 100 mho-vi, 76 mia-chie, 74 mia-rülielhou, 98 Miawano, 59–60 midwife, 87, 147 Miller, William Ian, 255 Mills, James Philip, 46n16, 137, 156nn7–8, 182, 186, 192n20, 263 mi-ki, 110 mimema, 112, 116 miphou-se, 107 mi-se, 94 misei, 109 missionary(ies) and education, 162–66 and ill health, 180 and medicine, 175–76 misu-kizei, 109 m¯ıtha¯ tel, 149 mithun, 99, 196, 211, 219

moiety, see kelhu Mokokchung, 164, 177 monolith(s), 219, 243

N nabhi, ¯¯ 144, 153 nacü, 75 nadi, ¯¯ 144 Naga cease-fire, 47n33 Christian nation, 221n16 contemporary politics, 27 database, 46n9, 46n16, 46nn21–22, 47, 257n10 ethnic groups, 17, 42n2 heterogeneity, 29 Hills district, 19–20, 22 Labour Corps, 46n16, 46n22, 189 legend of origin and migration, 30 origin of term, 29 political structure, 22 raids, 19–20 resistance to British, 21 scheduled tribe, 29 and the World Wars, 26 Naga Club, 24 Naga Hills District, 164–65 Nagaland border dispute, 28 for Christ, 3–4 districts, 17 formation of, 27–28, see also 47n29 greater, 28 Inner Line Permit, 27, 47n28 map, 16–17 special safeguards, 28 state, 16–17 Nagaland Baptist Church Council, 191n18, 227–28 Nagaland Christian Revival Church, 197, 242 Nagaland Missionary Movement, 223 Nagalim, 5, 221n16, 248 Nagamese, see language Naga Mothers’ Association, 14n4, 191n18, 241, 251 Naga National Council, 25, 27, 195, 221n3 Naga nationalist movement, 4, 10, 13, 36, 118, 120, 189, 224, 248, 249, 251, 261, 266n2 Naga Peace Convention, 250 Naga People’s Convention, 221n3 Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights, 266n13 nanyü, 52, 81, 83–84, 88, 100, 118n1, 125 narü, 75 natsei, xxviii, 75, 88, 136, 201, 239

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Index 295

natsei-narü, 75 necromancer, xxviii, 57, 64, 116, 123, 127, 137–38 Needham, Rodney, 47n24 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 25, 249 Neikhrienyu, 237 New Year, 85, 220 NNC, 27, 37, 47n34, 221n3, 242 non-Christian(s), xvii, 183, 187, 190n4, 196, 204, 247, 256 non-divinational healers, 123, see also dreams non-spirit beings, 58 NSCN (IM), xx, xxii, 5, 47n33, 202, 248, 256n1, 256n3 NSCN (K), xx, xxii, 256n3 nuobi, 86 nuobou nanyü, 88 nuobozhü, 87–89 nuokra-nuokrü, 86 nuoneipfü kelie, 86 nuo-phou, 71 nuosotho, 111, 112 nuotoupfü ba te, 86 nuotoupfü kelie, 86 nuoze, 86 nuoze-ruotho, 87 nurhaca, 141, 156n10

O oath, 56–58, 78n6 Oppitz, Michael, 221n7

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

P Pachuau, Lalsangkima, 221n8 pagan, 54 Panger, Imchen, 245n19 Parkin, David John, 82–83 Pawsey, Charles, 26, 170–71, 182 pehie, 101 pelie, xxviii, 114, 115 pelie-kro, xxviii, 41 pelie-yie, 41 penna, 84 Pentecostal church, 11, 197–98, 200, 206–8, 210, 214–15 healing, 225–27 service, 215 penuo, 86 penyü, xxviii, 73, 78, 80, 83–84, 85, 90, 92, 94, 100, 103, 104, 106, 112, 114, 116, 242–43 Perrine, S.A., 166, 185 Peseyie-Maase, Leno, 189, 224 pevi-ba, 109 peza-ba, 109 pfeyie, 108, 112

pfhenei-e, 212, 222n22 pfutsana, 53 phe, 62, 72 Phesama village, 57 phichü-mia, 101 phichü pehie, 101 phichü-u, 98, 108, 109, 110, 125 phi-sia, 74 Phizo, Zapu, 25, 27, 118n1, 195, 242–43, 244n2 pholonyü, 100–101 phou, 71, 140 Phouso rü se, 57 Pope John Paul II, 193 pranic, 230, 244n11 prayer centre, 149 fig. prayer group, 236 prayer house, 236 pregnancy, 86, see also nuobi; nuokra-nuokrü; nuoneipfü kelie; nuotoupfü ba te; nuotoupfü kelie priest, 98, see also kemovo, zievo, zhevo primary healthcare centre (PHC), 87, 154–55, 157, 231 and biblical verses, 232 primary healthcare training, see Catholic prohibition, 14n4, 191n18 pruo, 88, 99 prüzie gei, 235 puj¯a, 52, 137 puo mie, 108 Puthenpurakal, Joseph, 178, 180 putsano, xxviii, 35

R Rafael, Vicente, 79n23 Rao, O.M., 202, 221n15, 244n7 ratsen, 156 Raum, Otto Friedrich, 118n6 reconciliation, 13, 222n24, 244, 247 football match, 240, 244 Reid, Robert, 25 Restore Nagaland through Christ programme, 251 Revival church, 197–200, 204 Chiechama village, 198–200, 221n12 healing camps, 223 Menguzoma village, 198 miracles, 198–99 opposition by Baptist, 199 Revival movement, 198 rhei, 64–65 rho/ruo-se, 56 rhuochou-mia, 56 rice beer, 52, 54, 98, 141

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

296 Index

abstinence from drinking, 183, 203 as nutritious, Clark’s letter, 191n17 rieprei-bo, 87 rites of passage, 86 death, 90 pregnancy and birth, 86–90, see also nuoneipfü kelie; nuotoupfü kelie; urübei mo kecü rituals Angami terms, 83–84, see also genna; kenyü; penyü; thenyi calendrical, 84, 104 chiese leaf, 54 communal, 104, see also Sekrenyi for illness, disease, 97, see also derochü of lifecycle, 12, 97, see also rites of passage Rivenburg, Hattie, 118n9, 176, 178–80, 184 Rivenburg, Narola, 173, 184, 263 Rivenburg, Sydney and Bible translation, 68, 172–73 correspondence, 175, 178–80 Kaiser-I-Hind medal, 180 in Kohima, 178–79 as medical missionary, 179 medicine, 175, 178–80, 230 in Molung, 179 Robbins, Joel, 6, 8 rodo, 56–57, 64, 73, 75, 77, 139–40 rodo-u-kelu, 57 rolho, 56–57 Ross, Dr. Ronald, 191n9 rotshe, 56–57 rudi, 72 rudo, 57 rü hou-mia, 93 rüki, 102 rünyü-gi, 55 ruoda, 74 ruopfü, 61, 64–65, 138–40 ruopfü kekie, 101 ruoprei, 74 ruosuo, 101 ruotho-mia, 98–99, 119n21 rüsorüchümo, 103 rutzeh, 56 ruza, 72

S Sabbath, 85, 118n5, 166, 183 sacrifice, 101, see also ruosuo; terhuo shü; usieshü; uroshü Saimopfüka, 56 Sakhrie, Theyiechüthie, 242–43 salvation, 141 sanei, 65

Sanyü, Visier, 31, 48n42, 48n46, 221n3, 243, 265 Satan, 69, 140, 237 sei, 75 seikrünuo, 235 Seirhima, 75 seithei, 92 Sekhose, R., 53, 69, 101, 124, 137 Sekrenyi, 85, 93, 98, 105–18, 119n33, 119n34, 120n43–44, 120n46, 218, 220, see also chüzanhi; kizie; themuo ke-zha restricted holiday on, 117 sekre zutho, 107 senyü, 90 Seventh Day Adventists, 198, 216 shadow, see khrü shaman, 123, 125, 156n9, 157n20, 237, 245n19 Shan, 160, 163 shierulieva, 92, 119n17 shietsa, 93 shü rho, 71 Shürhozelie, Liezietsu, 108, 249 shü rüki, 74 si, 235 sickness, 51, 92, 178, 220, 247 Sierliezhü, 172 Simon Commission, 24–25, 190–91n7 sin, 70 Singh, Prakash, 46n22 Smilde, David, 7–8 Smith, William Carlson, 137, 177, 186–87, 208, 263 socha, 99 sokre-sene, 114–15 sokrü, 100 Sopfünuo, 63 Sophie, Kevizelie, 190n7 sotsa, 88 soul, 64 souls of the dead, 56 speaking in tongues, 136, 216, 239 spirit/s earth, 55–56 evil, 56 good, 56 offerings for, 98 sky, 55–56 sub-clan, see putsano Sundar, Nandini, 221n13 Sunday, 85 schools, 187, 208 service, 194, 208–16 Sundquist, John, 222n24

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

Index 297

Supplee, George, 10, 167, 168–73, 190n7, 192n21, 208, 222n19, 222n25 Syiemlieh, David, 194, 219–20 syncretism, 3, 11

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

T tanela-ki, 79n20 Tanquist, J.E., 167 and the translation of the Bible, 68, 172–73 tchü-khrü, 89 tea cultivation, 159, 190n2 drinking East India Tea Company, 161 plantations, 19 tei-giliede-mia, xxviii, 139, 151, 235 teigi-rhuo-mia, 56, 139, 155 tei-rhuo-mia, 127, 133–34 tekhu-mevi, 55, 65–66, 77 and Christianity, 66 Tekhu-ruo, 61 Telepfü, 58 temi, 64 Tengei-mia, 52 Tenyidie, see language Tenyimia People, 30, 52 Union, 34, 48n49 tepfe-kelie, 107 tephrie-mia, xvi terharogi, 73, 98, 119n23 Terhenyi, 93 Terhüja, 202, 221n14, 249 terhuo-dzeithuo, 74 terhuo-kecha, 55 terhuo-kesuo, xxviii, 56, 69, 78n5, 92, 238–39 and Angami Bible, 69 terhuo-keti, 55 terhuo-kevi, 56 terhuo-khwi, 138 terhuo-mia, 53, 63, 65, 90, 146, 156n6 and Bible translation, 69 concept of, 53 offerings for, 100–101, 108, 110 places associated with, 62–63 rocks associated with, 63 types of, 55–56 who abduct, 58 of wild animals, 60 see also themu-mia terhuo-pe, 132, 136, 137, 146, 156n11 case-study of, 139 method of trance, 141 rituals, performed by, 140 terhuo-pfi, 138

Terhuopfu, 54, 111 terhuo-rhei, 90 Terhuo-sei-kila, 62 terhuo shü, 101 Terhuo-tsükhe, 63 Terhuo-zha, 62 terhü, 94 thecü-kerhu, 62, 86 theguo, 61 thehe (thiehe), 84, 98–99 thehu-ba, 39, 111, 113 theja, 235 Thekrenyi, 94 themou, 124 themu-mia (themou-mia; themu-ma), xxviii, 101, 146, 154, 156, 156nn2–3, 157n19, 200 case study, 127 and Christianity, 132 divination, 129 process of becoming, 125–26 tutelary spirits, 129, 140 themuo ke-zha, 107, 112 themu-pfhi, 138, 156n11, see also terhuo-pe thenyi, 83–84, 120n36 thenyi-yatsei, 112, 115 thepe ke la, 103 thepe-thero, 102 thepe-thesa, 75, 102 thephou, 71, 108 theprie, 93 theprou, 110 therie-kese-mia, 57 the-ruo-kevi, 64 thesa, 102 thesie, 54, 99, 120n44, 144 thesü-ki, 42 thesü-rüka, 41 Thevoma (moiety), 125 thevü, 100 thevü dzü, 88 theza, 89, 111 thezie-kerhu, 238 thezie-suo, 72 thino, xxviii, 35–41 thi-sie, 110–11, 112, 120n44 Thomas, Nicholas, 123 thuophi, 119n25, 130, 140 thupfe-thie, 111, 112 tichü, 72 tiese-sei, 107 tiger, 199, see also tekhu-mevi fat as medicine, 150, 157n17 and hunting, 66 and man, 54, 65 rituals after killing, 67

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook

298 Index

tinyhü ruopfü, 238 tirhu-the, 111 trance, 124, 137, 139, 140–42, 215, 212, 245n19 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa, 251 Tsana-mia, 52 tsüba, 100 Tsükho, 60 tsüla, 115 tsütsu, 35 Tutu, Desmond, 256n9 twins, see nuobi

Copyright © 2012. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

U udze-kenei-khri, 108 uhu, 73 uhu-kechü, 73 Ukepenuopfü, 53–55, 61, 136, 156n6, 200, 215, 235 in Bible translation, 68–69 and healers, 144–45, 155 in rituals, 86, 108 u-kra-mia, 41 Üleiü, Viyie, 87 ulha, 87 ulheulhou, 71 ulheulhou-vi, 71 ulheulhou-suo, 71 umho, 76 umo, 71 unounya, 144 Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), 221n16 u-pelie-mia, 41 uphou, 71, 106 uphouchü-kemesa, 108, 112 uphou-mesa, 71, 108, 112 uphousanhie, 108, 112 Ura Academy, 44, 45, 49n60, 79n25, 104, 265 uroshü, 101 urübei mo kecü, 86 usieshü, 98, 101–2, 131 utsü kechü, 100

V Veer, Peter van der, 7 vengeance, 253–54 vi ba, 71 Viswema, 31, 40 vitho, 242 vopho, 74 vüzei, 108, 109

W Wati, Imchaba Bendang, 191–92n19, 244n6, 265 Western medicine, 230 wishü, 71 World Wars, 12 Allied forces, 26–27 Battle of Kohima, 26, 121n49, 159, 171, 173 bombing of Kohima, 173 and Christian conversion, 189 Kohima cathedral, 195–96, 221n5 and mission newsletters, 190n7 museum in Kisama, 47n24 Naga Labour Corps, 24, 26 Second World War, 171

Y Yamr a¯ j, 61 Yehzabo, 256n1 Yhashu, 58 yizei, 108 Yonuo, Asoso, 46n22

Z Zelouvi, xviii, 125, 129, 131–32, 135–36, 148– 49, 154–55, 204 zevi, 136, 144–45, 256n8 Zhasonyü, 56 zhatho, 56, 83 zhevo, 127–29 zhohe (or tsowhe) leaf, 88–89, 99 ziejümo/ziezhümo, 80n31 zievo, 98 zopie, 88 zutho, 54

A Matter of Belief : Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook