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Conversion to Christianity

among the Nagas, 1876-1971


Richard M. Eaton
University of Arizona
The entire history of India may be viewed, from one perspective, as a
somewhat constant attempt by settled agrarian populations of the low-lying

plains to extend their political and ecological frontiers into the outlying
jungles which, at one time, covered the entire subcontinent. Thus it was a
common endeavour of the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Cholas, the Khalajis,
the Tughluqs, the Mughals, and the British constantly to push back the
frontier separating agricultural fields and the jungle, and, by expanding the
area of land brought under the plow, to increase the wealth and power of the
state. From the viewpoint of the state, aboriginals already inhabiting Indias
forested regions had either to be transformed into agriculturalists, made to
serve incoming colonists from the plains, or driven off the land altogether.
Either way, the aboriginals contact with the agrarian states of the plains was
often traumatic and usually involved a certain amount of culture change.
While the plains societies did not remain uninfluenced by the aboriginal
societies surrounding them, on balance it was the latter who underwent the
greater culture change.
One aspect of this change was religion. As Indo-Aryan communities
pressed outward from the Gangetic Plain into the jungle they not only
cleared the forests and spread agricultural technology, but they absorbed
aboriginals into a caste system while imparting to them the essentials of
Vedic religion and culture. Similarly, when dynasties of the plains fell under
Buddhist influence some of the aboriginal peoples then brought into contact
with the plains became Buddhist (e.g., in Bihar under Asoka, third century
B.C., or in Punjab under Kanishka, first century A.D.). It was by a similar
process that as Muslim dynasties of medieval India extended their politicalecological frontier into Bengal and much of the Punjab, aboriginals of these
areas became absorbed into Islam.
Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Professors Robert E. Frykenberg of the University of
Wisconsin and Christopher R. King of the University of Windsor for arousing my interest in
Christianity among the Nagas. I am especially grateful to Prof. Frykenberg for introducing me
to the officials at the Bethel Seminary Archives, where many of the missionary papers used in
this paper are preserved. I also wish to thank the Seminary officials for kindly allowing me to

make use of their valuable records.

2/
With the advent of British rule, the results of this process were, first, that
much of the previously forested regions of the subcontinent had been
brought under the plow, and second, that many of the peoples of these
formerly forested areas by now identified themselves in terms of religious
traditions possessing a lettered, or literary, basis-traditions we might now
call Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic. Yet there still remained in India some
outlying comers or interior pockets of dense jungle as yet not cleared for
cultivation and whose aboriginal populations still practised indigenous reli-

gions. Accordingly, we find that despite the considerable efforts made in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries on Christianising the whole of British
India, it was in the more isolated regions that some of the mass movements
to Christianity occurred. And in these regions one of the best documented
movements is that which has occurred from the 1870s to the

present in
the
Hills
in
mountains
of
the
isolated
District,
Nagaland, formerly
Naga
Indias~ extreme northeast comer.
The significance of the Naga conversion movement is not only that it
perhaps typifies the religious dimension of culture change among aboriginal
societies facing the full brunt of Western imperial, industrial and ideological
onslaughts. It also suggests a paradigm of how previous aboriginals of India
might, in earlier epochs, have acculturated to Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam.

Note: Names in italics indicate district


of districts with the same name.

headquarters

/3

Naga Society and Culture

Separated by massive ridges from Burma to the east and the Indian state of
Assam to the north and west, Nagaland occupies a high and remote comer of
the world. The people native to this area, the Nagas, had never adopted any
of the traits of plains culture as developed by the Buddhist Burmese or the
Hindu Assamese. They had never known urban life, social stratification,
intensive rice cultivation based on sophisticated irrigation technology, cash
economy, traditions of central political authority, stable priesthood, literary
tradition, or any of the other attributes of surrounding civilisations. Instead,
the peoples of the Naga Hills were divided into over a dozen major linguistic
groups, most of which traditionally practised the sort of slash-and-burn
(jhum) agriculture that is typical of mountain peoples of South and Southeast
Asia. The largest such groups are indicated in Table 1.
Table 1

Population of Major Naga Groups

Source: Census of

India, 1961, Vol. 23, Part 2-C, pp.

122-27.

Historically, these peoples have remained remarkably isolated from more


advanced civilisations nearby. Six hundred years of proximity to Ahom .
civilisation in Assam failed to have appreciably affected Naga culture.
Throughout this period the Ahom chronicles tell of Naga raids on Assam;
and, in retaliation, occasional punitive expeditions were launched by the
Ahom kings against the Nagas. But the extraordinarily rugged terrain of the
Naga Hills doomed such expeditions; and, in a more general way, they
protected the Nagas from subjugation by the Assamese and with it, assimi.ration into Hindu society. Thus the two cultures remained apart. Ahom
kings preferred to regard Naga tribes as inferior, tributary vassals, though
they never came near to conquering the tribes. For their part, Nagas, being
economically self-sufficient, simply ignored the Assamese and never developed anything like a regular trading relationship with the Hindu society
of the plains. Their isolation from the Assamese, who formed, as it were,
1
Instead of irrigating and flooding a flat plain for intensive cultivation of wet rice, so typical
of plains populations, most Naga groups (except the Angamis) would slash-and-burn sections
of the jungle at ten to sixteen year intervals, then use the burned ash to fertilise the soil of hill
sides for the planting of millet, taro, or rice.

4
their only window on the outside world, was reflected in their ignorance of the
Assamese language. Probably not one man in a thousand and scarcely a
single woman, wrote a missionary in 1877, would understand a religious
conversation in Assamese.2
Even within the hills, the various Naga languages, though all belonging to
the Tibeto-Burman family, were so mutually unintelligible that communication between villages or communities of villages had to be carried out by the
use of sign language.3 These villages, moreover, were fortified by walls and
pickets, and placed on mountain tops so as better to defend their inhabitants
from enemy attack. The reasons for the fortifications and, to many outsiders
the Nagas most distinctive attribute-headhunting-lay in the pattern of
institutionalised violence that was fundamental to Naga culture. A Naga
village could not even ideally remain at peace, one anthropologist remarked,
as long as there prevailed the belief that the occasional capture of a human
head was essential for maintaining the fertility of the crops and the wellbeing of the community.4 While contributing to village cohesiveness,
however, the custom of inter-village warfare and the cultural values on
which it rested had the effect of narrowing very considerably the Nagas
vision of the world. To the Naga, wrote Furer-Haimendorf,

mankind appears as sharply divided between the small circle of his


co-villagers and clansmen, from whom he expects assistance and to whom
he is bound by a number of obligations, and the entire outward world
consisting of the people of his own tribe living in other villages as well as
the people of neighbouring tribes, who are his potential enemies and also
potential victims of headhunting. 5
Hemmed in both by the massive mountain ranges of the hills and by the
very walls of the typical village, most Naga groups developed religious
systems which were very locality-specific, that is, highly elaborated with

respect to the immediate, localised microcosm in which villagers lived.6 In


2
E.W. Clark, quoted in William C. Smith, The Ao Naga Tribe of Assam, London, 1925, pp.
176-77.
John H. Hutton, The Angami Nagas, London, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 291.
3
4
Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, Morality and Prestige among the Nagas, in M.C.
Pradhan (ed.), Anthropology and Archaeology: Essays in Commemoration of Verrier Elwin,
1907-64, London, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 156. The practice was probably rooted in
the magical idea of the fertilising power of blood. Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
The sources on Naga religions are unusually rich. It happens that two British officers who
had served in the former Naga Hills District in the 1920s and 1930s, J.P. Mills and J.H. Hutton,
were both trained ethnologists and wrote extensive monographs on the more important Naga
groups. From these and other researchers—among them the sociologist William C. Smith and
the well-known anthropologists von Furer-Haimendorf and Verrier Elwin—we can get a good
idea of the nature of traditional Naga religions before, during, and after their exposure to
Christian influence.

/5

1891, some fifteen years after Anglo-Indian armies got a foothold in the
Naga Hills, we hear of the earliest attempts by British officials to understand
Naga religion. E.A. Gait, writing in the Census of India for that year, noted:
There is a vague but very general belief in some one omnipotent being,
who is well disposed towards men, and whom therefore there is no
necessity for propitiating. Then come a number of evil spirits, who are ill
disposed towards human beings, and to whose malevolent interference
are ascribed all the woes which afflict mankind. To these, therefore,
sacrifices must be offered. These malevolent spirits are sylvan deities,
spirits of the trees, the rocks and streams, and sometimes also of the tribal

ancestors. 7

What Gait noted, well before the more detailed monographs on Naga
were certain fundamental attributes of what might be
termed the traditional Naga cosmology-a term I choose deliberately
because of its remarkable similarity to what Robin Horton has called the
traditional African cosmology.8 This cosmology may be characterised as a
two-tiered scheme consisting, at the upper tier, of a supreme deity who
underpinned the universe and who, though benevolent, was but vaguely
understood and seldom approached because of his remoteness from the
everyday concerns of Naga communities.
The lower tier of this traditional Naga cosmology consisted of a host of
minor spirits. Unlike the supreme god, these spirits were more sharply
perceived and given far greater attention precisely because they underpinned
the immediate reality which Nagas experienced. Since they controlled the
specific realities of everyday life-disease, crops, rain, human fertility,
death, etc.-it was through their agency that these phenomena could be
explained and predicted. These spirits were generally malevolent, or at least
whimsical, and therefore needed constant appeasement (usually in the form
of sacrifices of pigs, fowl or other living things) to keep them from bringing
havoc upon individuals or whole villages. For these purposes the services of
village specialists were required, some who operated vis-a-vis those spirits
who could affect the village as a whole, and others who interacted with
spirits affecting individuals.
Although more detailed consideration will be given to Naga religions
when we come to see how they interacted with Christianity, several general
points should be made here. First, the above sketch is only a rough framework, within which one finds a good deal of room for variation and elaboration
from one Naga group to another. Thus we find, for example, not only that
Angami-speaking Nagas and Rengma-speaking Nagas might give different

religions appeared,

E.G. Gait, Census 1891,


of India, Assam, Vol. 1, p. 93.
See his African Conversion, Africa, 41, No. 2, April, 1971, pp. 85-108, and his On the
Africa, 45, No. 3,1975, pp. 219-35; 45, No.4, 1975, pp. 373-99.
Rationality of Conversion,
8

6/

spirit possessing identical functions, but that the Angamis might


assign far greater importance to that spirit than would the Rengmas. Or,
some Naga groups-the Semas, for example-might show somewhat greater
concern for their supreme god than did other Nagas. Second, Naga religions
were not static, but dynamic, as we find that cults changed over time, and
that particular deities of one Naga group were occasionally incorporated
into the cosmology of other groups. All of this illustrates a certain fluidity to
the system which, like any religion as practised (though not necessarily as
preached), reflects the ongoing attempts of a society to explain, predict, and
control its environment. The chief reason for the high degree of fluidity in
Naga religions is related to the Nagas lack of a writing system, and hence of
a body of scripture by means of which a more stable religious system could
names to a

have evolved.
of the variations among Naga religions and of their dynamic,
quality helps to suggest how Christian conversions took place in the
Naga Hills. For just as it is incorrect to depict the Nagas as having no religion
at all, as some British administrators did, it is equally incorrect to see Naga
religion as an unchanging structure which Christianity simply replaced.
Rather, one finds that Naga religions, already in a process of evolution,
made further adaptations in their encounter with Christianity so as to
incorporate it and, in the process, to transform what had once been an alien
religious system into an indigenous one.
An

awareness

fluid

British Admi6istrators, American Baptists, and the Progress of Conversion


The British East India Company was drawn into the affairs of the Naga Hills
in a manner similar to that by which it was drawn into many parts of India: a
desire to protect its mercantile interests to its immediate rear while confronting a weakening or collapsing power immediately ahead. Thus in Assam it
was the declining Ahom dynasty, Burmese attempts to conquer the area,
and the Companys desire to protect its infant tea industry, that culminated
in the British annexation of Assam in 1842. As successors to the Ahoms, the
British inherited many of the problems the Assamese kingdom had faced,
including the occasional but terrorising Naga raids from the hills. Repeated
raids on Assam, especially by Angami Nagas, contributed to a tradition of
such disgust and horror in the minds of the Assamese as well as Englishmen
that a missionary of the 1880s could speak with dread of stories concerning
their cruel and wicked spears, ornamented with hair from the heads of
inoffensive old men and old women murdered expressly for this purpose.9
Throughout the mid-nineteenth century the British pursued the same
vacillating and ineffectual policies towards the Nagas as the Assamese had
9

Charles D. King, Henry Goldsmiths Good Work in Kohima, undated manuscript in the
Papers of J. E. Tanquist (unpublished manuscripts), Bethel Seminary Archives, St. Paul,
Minnesota. Hereafter referred to as Tanquist Papers.

/7
done before. In the 1830s they relied on local chiefs and rajas to check the
Nagas; in the 1840s they attempted punitive expeditions in the manner of the
Ahom kings; and in the 1850s they retreated from the hills altogether. But in
the 1860s and 1870s a radically new policy began to emerge, namely, ant
effort to persuade the Nagas to accept in their midst an English political
agent who would arbitrate disputes not only between the Nagas and the
British, but also among the Nagas themselves. British officials were amazed
and gratified to see representatives of Naga villages seeking British protection
from their own Naga enemies. Having once acquired this key political
foothold, a complete conquest of the Naga Hills was only a matter of time, as
more and more Naga villages saw a political and military advantage of
forming alliances with the new power from the plains. In 1878 the Government of India established a Political Officer in a headquarters at Kohima, in
the Angami country, and by 1889 the Ao country to the north had been
brought under British administration. In 1904 the boundaries of the Naga
Hills District were extended to include the Sema country, and the process of
expansion eastward continued until well into the present century, though at
a slower pace.
For a genre of literature that surpasses most others in point of unbounded
optimism, the Annual Report of the American Baptist Foreign Mission
Society for 1858 sounded gloomy indeed. For nearly twenty-three years, the
report noted, the Mission had been preaching to peoples of the Assam plain
under the flattering belief that a vast population would be accessible to
mission labour, which would also be a connecting link between India,
Northern Burmah and China.&dquo; The report went on to admit, though, that
sober experience had shown how grandiose the plan was, citing Assamese
insurrections, disease, and defections, in addition to the poor harvest of
Christian baptisms. Then, without explaining the causes of the Baptists
general failure in the plains of Assam, the report closed by urging its
readings to cast their gaze elsewhere: on the mountain tribes still better
I
prospects dawn.&dquo;
These words proved most prophetic, for the Christian conversion movement among the Nagas was to become one of the large mass movements to
Christianity in Asia. In 1869, fully twenty years before the British were
established in the Ao country, we hear of the following encounter:
As he

[Rev.

Edward P.

Scott] approached the first Naga village, he was

met by twelve naked warriors with spears poised to strike him. Quickly he
began to play his violin and to sing, Am I a Soldier of the Cross?

Entranced, the men dropped their spears and shouted for more.
10

12

American Baptist Mission Union, 44th Annual Report, May, 1858, p. 16.
Ibid., p. 17.
12
Robert G. Torbet, Century of Faith: The Story of the American Baptist Foreign Mission
Society, 1814-1954, Philadelphia, 1955, p. 285.
11

8/
It was on this promising note that the long relationship between Naga and
Baptist, at first glance so culturally alien to each other, commenced. Scott,
to be sure, did not live to see any fruits of his labour as he died of cholera that
same year. But three years later, in 1872, another American Baptist, E.W.
Clark, reached the Naga Hills and a whole new era began. Instead of a
violin, Clark brought with him an Assamese Christian who had learned the
Ao language and through whom Clark began preaching in Ao villages. Clark
did not permanently reside among the Aos at this time, but returned to the
plains with nine Nagas who wished to become Christian. Four years later, in
1876, the missionary determined to devote the remainder of his life to the
Nagas, and returned to the hills to reside among the Aos. Although he faced
the stiff opposition of villagers who viewed him as a disguised agent of the
Company, Clark managed to attract a tiny following in the village of Deka
Haimong. The little band of disciples, wrote his wife, Mary Clark, with a
few others favourably inclined toward the new religion, mostly men, met
together from Sabbath to Sabbath to discuss with Mr. Clark &dquo;the power-

filled doctrine&dquo;.33
But the very emergence of a Christian community caused difficulties
which called for a drastic remedy. By insisting that his tiny band of fifteen
followers observe Sunday as a day of rest, Clark directly interfered with the
rhythm and routine of Naga village life, for nearly all work in Ao villages--

hunting, sowing, harvesting-was done on a communal basis, and any


interference with that rhythm naturally undermined a villages economic
functioning, not to mention its ritual solidarity. Hostility mounted, and the
village council became divided as to what action to take, since it was faced
with what was surely an unprecedented sort of assault on its religious and
I&dquo;

social life.
At this point Clark determined on a fateful course. On 24 October, 1876,
he and his fifteen converted families, bearing all their household effects,
passed through the village gates of Deka Haimong amid the jeers, taunts,

scoffs, and threats of the villagers, and made a three hours march northward
they founded a new, all-Christian village which they named Molung.
Although the new village struggled for survival in the earliest weeks and
months-the only reason Deka Haimong refrained from attack was its belief
where

that the venture would fail and the white mans followers would return to the

parent village-the bold experiment worked. Isolated families trickled over


to Molung from the parent village as it became apparent that the new village
would be permanent, though there was certainly no mass movement at this
13

Mary M. Clark, A Comer in India, Philadelphia, American Baptist Publications Society,


1907, p. 17.
14
Ao villages range in size anywhere from twenty to 300 houses, each house containing a
nuclear family of husband, wife and children. As Mary Clark described Deka Haimong as a
crowded village, fortified by a heavy stockade, we may assume that it was one of the larger
villages, of which Clarks following probably represented from 5 to 10 per cent.

9
time. Families from other villages gradually came in and we soon numbered
a hundred houses, recalled Clarks wife; gradually other villages, seeing
our prosperity, began asking for teachers, and the Nagas not being sufficiently
advanced, a few Assamese Christians were called for evangelistic and educational works
Over the course of the next fifteen years Clarks community had not only
grown but had made inroads in the ruling structure of the parent village.6
Accordingly we find Clark himself writing:
On the last Sabbath of February, 1892, three men were baptised at Deka
Of these, one was the chief man of the village. These
three, with other church members who had moved there from Molung
and from Yazong, were formed into a church of eleven members. It was
here that the first evangelical work in the tribe was begun; but the
persecution was so hot that most of the Christians migrated, and formed a
new village at Molung. But the Nazarene is now victorious even here, as
the ruling element is now Christian. Am expecting to soon baptise converts
in another out-station and form a church there.&dquo;7

Haimong village.

Apart from the theological dimensions of the changes then taking place, to
be examined later, the main social dimensions of Christian conversion
among the Nagas are already evident from the discussion so far. First, it is
clear that conversion to Christianity generally occurred at the expense of

village cohesiveness; and, second, one notes the pattern of village leaders
initially opposing the movement but eventually joining, or even leading it.
Encouraged by Clarks initial successes, the Mission Board sent three
more missionaries to the Naga Hills during the final two decades of the
century. But two of these missionaries, arriving fresh from the United States
and adamantly opposed to the compromises with Naga culture that Clark
had allowed his converts to make, resolved to give up Molung as a centre and
move

mission activities further in the interior.8 Thus in 1894 a new Mission

15

M. Clark, Comer, p. 91. The best account of the early formation of the Christian
community is found in Mary Clarks Comer in India. This account is well corroborated by the
traditions remembered by old timers of Molung and related orally in the 1920s to another
missionary, B.I. Anderson. These are recorded in his A New Way of Life for the Nagas,
(unpublished essay), Bethel Seminary Library, St. Paul, Minnesota, pp. 17-18.
Clarks exodus from Deka Haimong and his founding of Molung are strikingly reminiscent
of the Prophet Muhammads decision to seperate his band of followers from Mecca and
establish a new community in Medina, giving rise to the formal beginning of Islam in 622 A.D.
16

Clarks successes with local chiefs also finds parallel in the inroads the Medina Muslims made in
the Meccan ruling structure, culminating in the latters bloodless surrender to the followers of
Muhammad.
17
American Baptist Mission Union, 78th Annual Report, May, 1892, p. 85.
18

Najekhu Y. Sema, A Study of the Growth and Expansion of Baptist Churches in


Nagaland with Special Reference to the Major Tribes, Master of Theology thesis, Bethel
Theological Seminary, 1972, p. 31.

10/
station

founded at a new village named Impur. For his part Clark, the
lonely pioneer, remained until 1911 in Molung where, almost in the manner
of an Ao village elder, he shepherded his flock and tirelessly worked at his
many translation projects. But the Impur Mission and its associated institutions represented a far more systematic and rationalised effort to transform
Naga culture. The same can be said for a second such Baptist beachhead
among the Nagas, the Kohima Mission, established in 1878 by C.D. King in
the heart of the Angami country, some eighty-five miles southwest of Impur.
Throughout the entire period of American Baptist evangelisation in the
Naga Hills, down to 1954, Impur and Kohima remained the two centres
from which American missionaries operated. And although a total of only
some two dozen American missionaries operated in the Naga Hills between
1876 and 1954, with normally only a handful there at any one time, these two
stations provided the impetus for profound culture change, of which conversion to Christianity was but one aspect. Other aspects included linguistic
simplification, the spread of literacy, and the breakdown of Naga isolation
was

generally.
One area of culture change was in language. Eager to get vernacular
translations of the New Testament into circulation as quickly as possible, the
missions at Impur and Kohima reduced the various Naga languages to
written forms and built up a body of vernacular literature which represented
the first literature these people had ever possessed. The effect of this work
was greatly to simplify the linguistic landscape of the Naga Hills.9 By
selecting from among the many Ao dialects just the dominant dialect for
reduction to Roman script, the missionaries in effect doomed most of the
other dialects to eventual oblivion. This was because literacy became the key
to education, which in turn became the key to social mobility. In time, the
Aos realised the advantage of learning the standard Ao dialect which had
been selected for reduction to script. And eventually the same process
occurred in the Angami, the Sema, the Lotha, and the other Naga regions.
The chief institution through which both education and Christian conversion were effected was the village school. Indeed without this mechanism
the rapid education and conversion of many thousands of Nagas, if left solely
to a handful of missionaries, would have been unthinkable. In 1905 the
second missionary posted in Kohima, Sidney Rivenburg, was summoned by
the Chief Commissioner of Assam to talk about the establishment of village
schools. When Rivenburg showed the Commissioner the books he had
translate+-a primer, parts of the New Testament, and books on arithmetic
19
Accordingly, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, E.W. Clark translated the
books of Matthew and John, an Ao-English dictionary, a hymn book, a primer and a catechism;
by 1929 the complete New Testament was translated by two other missionaries and their Ao
colleagues. The sequence for the translation of scripture for other Naga communities followed the
same pattern, though beginning somewhat later. See J.S.M. Hooper, Bible Translation in India,
Pakistan, and Ceylon, second edition, London, Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 164-69.

11

and

hygiene-the latter expressed his willingness to have the books printed


stating that he wanted men to be trained to teach in
village schools. 20
Thus launched, the village school mechanism rapidly grew: by 1923 the
Mission ran 208 schools, chiefly primary, serving 5,438 pupils.2 Essentially,
a village desiring a school provided the building and the rice for the teacher,
though the latter was occasionally obliged to tend his own plot of land
granted him by the village chief or council. The government paid the
teachers salary and financed the printing of textbooks. And the missionaries
wrote the textbooks, trained the teachers at Kohima or Impur, supervised
their work, and inspected each village school twice annually. Pupils completing three years in village schools could then leave their villages and
enroll as secondary school pupils in either the Kohima or Impur Mission
Training Schools. z2 There, students could study carpentry, blacksmithing,
typewriting or rice terrace cultivation, in addition to the regular academic
courses; and from there they typically joined government service or returned
to villages as primary school teachers. 23
By the time graduates had left one of the two training schools to embark
on village education, they had been brought under enormous Christian
influence, such that the Annual Report for 1923 could note with satisfaction
that the government can secure the service of practically none but Christians
as teachers.2 Missionaries were quite able to circumvent the teacher training
schools secular facade necessitated by the fact of partial government support.
For example, they manipulated the government requirement of six school
days and one holiday in such a way that Sunday was one of the school days,
meaning that students had to attend church services in order to get credit for
regular school attendance. 25 The great majority of the staff at the training
schools, moreover, were themselves Naga converts.26 Hence when villages
at government expense,

20

Sidney W. Rivenburg, The Star of the Naga Hills, Philadelphia, Judson Press, 1941, pp.
96-97.
21
American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 109th
Annual Report,
1923, p. 113.
22
American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 96th Annual Report, 1910, p. 78.
23
Tanquist Papers, 1935, p. 223b. The philosophy of linking an ethic of manual work to
Christian precepts extends deep into the history of Protestantism. If one goes back to Professor
Franke of Halle University and the very origins of modem Protestant foreign mission movements, one finds that two things were stressed: (a) literacy, so that each man could read his own
scripture, following the priesthood of believers doctrine; and (b) manual labour, which was
seen as useful, practical, good for humility, therapeutic, and in conformity to ancient Jewish or
Rabbinical custom, in which every boy should have some hand skill or artisan trade. (I am
indebted to a communication from Professor Frykenberg for this observation.)
24
American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 109th Annual Report,
1923, p. 115.
25
There may be some complaint, J.E. Tanquist admitted, because directly religious work
is carried out in a Government-supported religious-community school. But what then? Would
it not be better to lose that support than to be in any way hindered from carrying out our
God-given task of winning souls for Christ? Tanquist Papers, 1923, pp. 117-18.
26
1942, p. 300.
Ibid.,

12/

requested teachers for what was typically their first local school, they were
normally sent a Christian youth whom the Mission paid, in addition to their
government salary, a sum of about $4 a month to preach in addition to doing
his school work The process of evangelisation among distant Naga communities, and the critical importance of the village teacher in this process, is
seen in the 1933 field report of the senior missionary at Kohima, J.E.

Tanquist:
The

Rengma tribe has a population of between 5,000 and 6,000, living in


fairly large villages not far apart. Their language was reduced to print
only a few years back and a beginning at Scripture translation was made.
But they have never had a missionary of their own. The combined church
membership is more than two hundred, and new names are being added.
Just today [15 August 1933] a Christian young man, formerly a student at
our Kohima Training School, reported that the leaders in a heathen
village are asking him to come and open a school in their midst. That will
mean a beginning for a Christian work there.28
Four years later the same missionary put it even more simply:
With a mission school there immediately follows a Sunday School and out
of that grows a church. The history of many a church in Assam can be
traced back to an investment of say, forty dollars per year for the placement
of a Christian teacher in an otherwise unevangelised village. 29
Still another area of culture change stimulated by missionary influence
the breaking down of old barriers within and between linguistic groups.
One way this was done, as we have seen, was by training village students in
Impur or Kohima where they were mixed with 300 to 800 other youths from
scattered origins, and then sent as primary teachers not to their native
villages, but to some other village in their native linguistic area. The Mission
also organised large associations to serve as forums for discussion on social
welfare activities as well as church policy. But these associations also served
to integrate Nagas of the same language groups. The first such organisation
was the Ao Association, founded in 1897, followed by the Angami Association in 1925 and the Sema Association in 1927. With their huge annual
meetings drawing thousands from distant villages, these associations not
only broke down inter-village barriers but raised to a much higher level the
forum of discussion on issues formerly decided only at the village level.3o
was

27
28

Ibid., 1934, p. 204.


Ibid., 1933, p. 192.

29

1937, p. 249.
Ibid.,
In 1925 William C. Smith could write that the annual association meeting is the big
gathering in the hills, with an attendance that exceeds the thousand mark. Prior to this there was
no gathering beyond the village. Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, p. 200.
30

/13
In some of these areas of culture change the Government of India not only
concurred with Mission policy, but contributed to the process. The government, too, wished to reduce linguistic diversity, promote literacy, and break
down barriers that had served to isolate Nagas from themselves. Mission and
government were also agreed concerning the practice of headhunting, which,
though a cornerstone of Naga culture, the government rigidly banned. But
respecting most other areas of Naga culture the government and Mission
clashed over how much should be preserved, altered, or abolished outright.
Interested primarily in maintaining peace and security, the government
aimed to interfere with native custom as little as posssible.
But the missionaries felt differently. As one of them put it in 1913: These
people are very interesting, but that is not the main purposes of our being
here, simply to study these interesting people; but we are here to strive to
help them to something better.3 Although in theory this meant that
missionaries would be content with Nagas accepting Christian baptism and
abandoning, as another missionary put it, the miserable worship patterns
handed down to them by their ancestors,32 in practice the missionaries
demanded much more. Candidates for baptism were required to pass a stiff
examination on knowledge of Christian doctrine and furnish evidence that
they had not participated in any heathen ritual, nor drunk any beer for
three months.33 One problem here was that missionaries infused into their
understanding of Christianity values acquired from their upbringing in the
Prohibitionist American mid-West, values which clashed very strikingly
with Naga values. A more fundamental problem was that Naga religioni.e., heathen rituals--could not simply be isolated and excised out of the.
matrix of Naga culture in which it was embedded. To be sure, some missionaries seem to have recognised this,34 but most seem not to have cared.
The dominant missionary opinion was well expressed by Mary Clark when
she wrote, the Nagas, once civilised and Christianised, will make a manly,

worthy people.35
Thus a total cultural transformation was called for. There was, for example,
the matter of converts adopting new kinds of clothing. It was again Clarks
wife who noted with approval that their Ao converts in general, and especially
their students, had adopted the Assamese jacket and body cloth.36 Later,
more

explicitly European styles were adopted,

such

as

long shirts,

mauve

coats, khaki shorts, or white blouses imported from the plains. By the 1920s,
however, the question of clothing became the focus of open controversy
31

William C. Smith in Standaret, 31, Dec. 1913. Cited in Tanquist Papers, 1913, p. 75.
Tanquist Papers, 1922, p. 126.
33
Rivenburg, Star, p. 117.
34
J.E. Tanquist once cited the cleavages and animosities incident to the spread of Christianity
among people who are closely knit together in village life and whose very village customs
constitute their old religion. Tanquist Papers, 1936, p. 239.
32

35

36

M. Clark, Comer, p. 33.


Ibid., p. 54.

14/
between Mission and government. J.P. Mills, who had lived among the Aos
as a district official from 1917 to 1937, vigorously attacked this practice,
charging that hot, baggy Western clothing not only exposed converts to new
diseases and interfered with their field work, but had the adverse psychological effect of causing its wearers not to see themselves as Nagas, but in
some way as foreigners. 37 So serious had this controversy become that, in
1925, British local officers refused to allow the Mission to start work in a new
area until they agreed not to impose Western clothing on their converts. 38
Aiming at something far more central to Naga culture, the missionaries
forbade their male converts to live in the village morung. This was a large
communal hall which served a variety of purposes: it was the lodge where
young men of the same exogamous clan slept before they married and
moved into separate houses. It frequently served as a guard-house as it was
generally located near the village gates; and it was the focal point for the
major village celebrations and feasts that marked its ritual year. On this
issue, also, the Mission and government clashed and, as one observer
recently remarked, a great deal of confusion must have been caused in the
minds of the tribesmen if one Sahib praised their morung as the most
excellent of institutions and the other decried it as an invention of evil

splrlts.39
Still another basic Naga institution

discouraged by the missionaries, prebecause


of
its
association
with
sumably
Naga deities, was the Feast of Merit.
This was a carefully ranked sequence of feasts given by individuals for their
village or for their clan within a larger village, the giving of which raised the
sponsors position in the eyes of his peers, thereby constituting a major
channel of social mobility. Great quantities of food supplies were expended
on these Feasts of Merit, and they occasioned much drinking and merrymaking. Economically, too, they were important since they permitted an
equitable distribution of perishable food supplies which, without adequate
means of preservation, would otherwise have spoiled.~ And finally, there
was the Baptists rigid stand against the drinking of rice beer, a drink that
was central to the Feasts of Merit and most other ceremonies.4 In fact, the
missionaries developed such an obsession with this issue that by the 1940s,
wrote Mills, non-drinking became popularly accepted as the outstanding
mark of a Christian. 42
37

J.P. Mills, The Ao Nagas, London, Macmillan and Co., 1926, p. 422.
Tanquist Papers, 1925, p. 135.
39
Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, Return to the Naked Nagas, New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1976, p. 50.
40
Ibid., p. 47.
41
Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf wrote that to the Ao a feast without rice beer is
unthinkable, and that without rice beer the life of the Angami is little more than a bad dream.
Ibid., p. 48; idem., The Naked Nagas, second revised Indian edition, Calcutta, 1962, p. 7.
42
J.P. Mills, The Effect on the Tribes of the Naga Hills District of Contacts with Civilisation,
in Census of India, 1931, Vol. 3, Assam, Pt. 1, Report. Appendix A, Calcutta, 1932, p. iv.
38

15
Beause of these conflicts between

Naga culture and the norm upheld by

the

Baptist missionaries, many converts appeared to do a good deal of


wavering and wobbling in terms of religious allegiance. Mills wrote of cases
of people avoiding conversion in order 10 have a good time until they
became old or sick, when the fear of Hell would prompt them to convert. A
religion so easily assumed can be as easily discarded, he wrote,

and one finds many men who have changed their faith as often as seven or
eight times, or even more. A man will become a (nominal) Christian and
be baptised. Then his soul yearns for madhu [rice beer] and, since anyone
who touches alcohol is expelled from the Baptist community, he often
goes the whole hog and joins the non-Christians again. Later he may
change his mind, give up his madhu and heathen practices and be
readmitted to the Baptist Church.43
This vacillation and ambiguity was also noticed by Census officials who,
instructed to fit Indian social groups into neat, pre-determined pigeonholesr--Christian or Animist-naturally had difficulty interpreting the
phenomenon of the religious change then occurring in the Naga Hills. 44
The Census officials were not alone, of course, in seeing the situation in
clear Christian or Animist terms. Missionaries naturally had their own
well-defined categories and did not hesitate to weed out whomever they
considered backsliders. Thus in August, 1894, the Impur missionaries cut
the number of Christians on their registers from seventy-five to four, and in
1927 the Kohima missionaries cut the number of Angami Christians on their
rosters from 150 to about fifty, in both cases arousing a good deal of
resentment and anger among those who had been thus defined out of the
Church.45 It was due to just these stringent criteria that the number of
baptised members, duly kept on the official rosters, always lagged behind
the much larger size of the Christian community, that is, those individuals
who, regardless of what the missionaries thought, considered themselves
Christian and told the Census officials so. 46
43

Mills, Ao Nagas,

pp. 413-14.
Since these officials had to choose in every case between labelling people Christian or
Animist, one might even sympathise with their despair, for any fluid process by definition
defies such static categories. Thus the 1921 Census recorded that many Aos were found to have
become backsliders; though previously Christians, they appeared to have renounced entirely
their Christianity, nor did they show the usual outward signs of Animism in observance of
gennas [taboos], etc. It is ultimately decided that their religion was more Animism than
anything else, and they were entered as Animist. Census of India, 1921, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 56.
45
Tanquist Papers, 1936, p. 232.
46
The Christian community would also include children of baptised family members, who it
was assumed were being raised in a Christian environment and therefore bore a Christian
identity. Contrast the figures for Christian population in Tables 2 and 3 with the membership
figures given in Table 4.
44

16/
Given the exclusivistic attitudes of the missionaries on the one hand, and
the integration of Naga religion with village life on the other, it is obvious
that severe social tensions were generated wherever the missionaries or their
school-trained village teachers preached. Missionary records are replete
with stories of such conflicts. The following case, involving an Angami
village in 1922, is quite typical:

village the persecution against the small and yet weak group of
Christianity had been especially persistent.... One of the
four village elders, recognised by Government, was Tsukhinga, an
unusually shrewd but truculent man. He came home from the fields as I
was speaking through interpreters to a crowd in front of the tent and
interrupted me with a good deal of determination, saying he wanted us to
desist from trying to spread these ideas any further in this country, and he
warned his people not to give up their old ways .... From his viewpoint ...
he may have been honest enough in his zeal to keep the community from
breaking up into two divisions so different in attitudes and actions. His
intrusion did not cause us much dismay, however, but rather added to the
interest of the people as we resumed speaking. 47
In this

converts to

The

for the

village elders consternation are not hard to find. After


converting Christianity Nagas often refused to contribute their share
towards the celebration of village-wide festivities. Why should they, converts
argued, have to pay the village elders a rice-tax for the support of festivities
in which they would not participate? For their part the non-Christians could
legitimately complain that the converts non-participation in field work on
Sundays added up to an annual village loss of fifty-two days of labour from
the converted portion of its population.
Inevitably the government was drawn into controversies surrounding
conversion, as both Christian and non-Christian villagers brought their
complaints to the Deputy Commissioners office in Kohima. As we have
seen, in the early days of Clark and Rivenburg, a common ideal of educating
if not civilising the Nagas had inspired cooperation between British administrators and American missionaries. But once a substantial body of Christian
converts emerged, creating the sort of tensions just mentioned, Mission and
causes

to

government relations became

more strained. In 1905 a local officer had


ruled that where Christians were a minority in a village, they would have to
bear their share of the expenses in all village rituals. But this decision was
overruled by his superior, who issued a general order that the religious
scruples of the Christians must be properly respected. 48 Regardless of their
relative strength in a village, then, converts got government backing in their
refusal to pay village taxes. But this order did not quell strife within villages.
47

48

Tanquist Papers, 1922, p. 128.


American Baptist Mission Union, 92nd Annual Report, 1906, p.

157.

/17
And as the overall size of the Christian community grew, the government
acted more and more to defend the non-Christian cause while deploring
meddling by missionaries in Naga culture.49 On the other hand, by 1934, one
district official, doubtless in a spirit of exasperation, finally took the rather

startling course of urging all those people who wished to turn over to
Christianity to do so by villages. 50 This, in fact, is just what had been
happening anyway from around the 1920s when mass movements, especially
among the Aos and Semas, had begun. The district officers, then, were
hardly indulging in a bit of proselytising for the Christian cause; they were
merely recognising what was becoming by 1934 a fait accompli and urging
that it be allowed to complete its course in the most peaceable manner
possible.
The rapid pace of Christian conversion in the Naga Hills is quite clearly
indicated in both the Census data, which give us decennial tabulations of the
Christian community on a district-wide basis, and in the Mission records
which give us baptism membership figures broken down for linguistic groups.
Using Tables 2 and 3 which are based on the Census data, and Table 4 which
is based on the Mission data, it is possible to make rather precise statements
about the geography and chronology of the movement. The tables reveal the
51I

very slow start the movement had from 1876, whtn Clark founded Molung,
to 1911, when the percentage of community Christians stood at a mere 2.2
per cent. Even as late as World War II, with only 17.9 per cent of the Nagas
declaring themselves Christian, the strength and resilience of the traditional
Naga religions would seem to have been assured. Yet it was precisely at that
time, during World War II and after, that Christian conversions saw their
most dramatic upsurge, rising steadily in the post-war years to a high in 19711
of 66.7 per cent in Nagaland as a whole, and as much as 88.6 per cent in
Mokokchung district, which is dominated by the two groups that converted
most readily, the Aos and the Semas. The latter point is indicated in Table 3,
as is also the recent and rapid extension of Christianity eastward in the
Tuensang district, dominated by Konyak Nagas.

Explaining Conversion
How best can one account for the quite demonstrable religious changes that
49

Thus J.P. Mills, the Subdivisional Officer in the Ao country from 1917 to 1924, wrote
bitterly in 1926 that no member of the Mission has ever studied Ao customs deeply, but nearly
all are eager to uproot what they neither understand nor sympathise with, and to substitute for it
a superficial civilisation. Mills, Ao Nagas, pp. 420-21. On the subject of social tensions caused
by the appearance of Christian communities within villages, J.E. Tanquist wrote that both
missionaries and native Christian leaders need to take more literally the truth that it is blessed to
be reviled and persecuted for Christs sake and not something that we should by all means
50
avoid. (Tanquist Papers, 1934, p. 199.)
Tanquist Papers, 1934, p. 199.
51
was
that
the
native
religions in the hills of Assam
predicted
Already in the 1931 Census it
were ultimately doomed to extinction. Census of India,
1931, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 194.

18
Table 2

Christian Population in Nagaland, 1881-1971

Note: The

figures for 1881-1901 refer only to the western portion of present-day Nagaland.
Areas then under British administration included parts of Mokokchung and Kohima
districts and none of Tuensang district. For 1911-51 the effective area included all of
present-day Mokokchung and Kohima districts, but none of Tuensang district in the
east. For 1961 and 1971 all three districts are represented.
Source: Census of India, 1881, Assam, pp. 22, 38;1891, Assam, p. 16;1901, IV, Pt. 2, pp. 1, 9;
1911, III, Pt. 2, pp. 2, 14; 1921, III, Pt. 1, pp. 26, 61;1931, III, Pt. 1, p. 200; 1941, IX,
pp. 2,23, X, p. 8; 1951, XII, Pt. 2-A, pp. 2,107; 1961, XXIII, Pt. 2-A, p. 154; Stai*oi,:Ca!
Handbook of Nagaland, 1973, Kohima, 1973, pp. 44-46.
Table 3
Christian Population of Nagaland by 1)istricts,19i61-71

Source: Census of India, 1961, XXIII, Pt. 2-A, p. 154, and Statistical Handbook of Nagaland,
1973, Kohima, 1973, pp. 44-46.

have taken place in the Naga Hills in the past hundred years? How can one
explain the uneven pace of conversion through time and space? Why were
certain Naga groups attracted to Christianity more than others? And if
conversion to Christianity involved a repudiation of so much of Naga culture,
why did it occur at all?
In seeking answers to these questions one might be tempted to focus on
the primary agents of religious change, the American Baptist missionaries,
and explain the patterns of conversion by reference to their distribution in
time and space. But this line of reasoning is contradicted by a lack of

/19
Table 4

Baptised Membership of the Ao, Sema, and Angami Baptist Convention, 1900-71

Source: P.T.

PhiliF, Growth of the Baptist Churches, pp. 59, 78, 93.

consistent correlation between the incidence of conversion and the presence


of foreign missionaries. It can be seen by comparing the growth of baptised
membership (Table 4) with the distribution of missionaries (Table 5) that
whereas the growth of the Ao baptised community corresponds with intensive
missionary work among that group, the situation is quite different concerning
the other two groups. Between 1880 and 1954 seven missionaries to the
Angamis worked a combined total of 117 years, yet the pace of conversion
among that group lagged far behind that of the Aos. On the other hand, the
Semas converted at a rate only five to ten years behind that of the Aos, yet
with a fraction of the missionary input. The Semas, in fact, never had a
missionary among them until 1948, which was after the steepest climb of
conversion had already taken place for that group. Indeed, for these three
groups as a whole there were twenty-three missionaries between 1876 and
1954;52 yet there were only six in the field after 1940, which was when the
most dramatic increases for all three groups began. Clearly, then, Christian
conversion among the Nagas cannot be explained in terms of the number of
distribution of foreign missionaries.
Table 5

Foreign Missionary Service among Ao, Sema,

and Angami Nagas

Source: Sema, A Study of the Growth, pp. 117--18.


52

not

Some of them served among more than one linguistic group, which is why this figure does
tally with those given in Table 4.

20/

Shifting the focus from the missionaries to the converts, one might interpret
the latter as motivated by political, social, or other forms of self-interest.
This, in fact, was the mode of reasoning sometimes expressed by British
district officials serving in the area. J.H. Hutton considered that the exemption from payment of village taxes, granted by the government in 1905,
prompted villagers to convert to Christianity. 53 But this confuses the consequence of conversion for its cause; in the early period villagers did not
petition district officials for such exemptions until after the fact of their
conversion. Even in the period after the exemption was made, potential
converts would have had to weigh the benefits of nonpayment of several
baskets of rice against the severe disapprobation of all the other villagers, on
whom they depended for economic, political and social support. Nor does
one find in the Naga Hills the sort of severe decline in economic standards
that might have placed the hill people in a state of relative deprivation, so
that religious change would have ridden the back of a movement for social
reform. The independent and self-reliant Nagas had never experienced a
pariah status either internally or in relation to outsiders.
Religious change in Nagaland, in other words, cannot be explained in
strictly nonreligious terms. Rather, the key to these changes is to be found in
the particular forms of interaction between the Nagas religious cosmology
and their social relations, each of which influenced the other. In a most
way, what happened in the Naga Hills in the first half of the
twentieth century was an opening of a theretofore highly insulated society
and culture to a much wider world. This is seen, for example, in the dramatic
innovations that immediately rendered obsolete many areas of Naga material
culture: kerosene lanterns replaced reed torches, buttons replaced shells,
safety matches replaced bamboo friction devices, steel needles replaced
native weaving.54 Firearms, of course, became the most eagerly sought-after
Western implement in the Naga Hills, as elsewhere. 55 But new diseases such
as tuberculosis and venereal disease were also introduced, and by the 1930s
epidemics in the hills spread more quickly than ever before.56 All of this
directly followed the opening up of the hills first to pony trails and later, by
the 1930s, to regular roads for vehicular traffic. 57 Symbolising the Nagas
economic integration with the rest of the Indian subcontinent was the
introduction of the metal currency of the British as a medium of exchange,
replacing unhulled rice, which was formerly used for that purposes. 58

general

53
54

Hutton, Angami Nagas, pp. 373-74.


Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, pp. 180-81.

55
An Angami, wrote Major John Butler in 1875, will give almost anything he has for a gun,
and if he cannot get it by fair means, will run any risk to get it by foul. Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal, 21, 1875, p. 323. Cited in Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, p. 180.
56
Mills, Effect, p. 11.
57
In 1930 George Supplee rode his motorcycle from the plains to Impur and Kohima via
Wokha.
58
Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, p. 188.

21

But the process of

opening

up the hills also eroded

some

of the most

fundamental institutions of the villages, a development for which the government was directly responsible. Consider, for example, the long-term
effect of the Pax Britannica on a people whose cultural values had been

shaped largely by a history of institutionalised warfare. Inter-village warfare


rigid discipline and training; and the morung had functioned in

demanded

part as a sort of barracks. But the advent of British-Indian rule brought not

only the removal of village defences and curbs against carrying arms, including
the spear; it also brought a quartering of troops among more turbulent
villages, and an occasional demonstration of military might in others. The
governments aim in all of this was to control the Nagas with a presence of
force such as they had never seen before. The price of this peace, though,
was the gradual erosion of traditional village authority and the martial
values on which that authority rested. The rigid discipline started ebbing,
wrote one observer, and the village chiefs, who were the leaders of the
on war footing, started losing their hold over their
warriors.-&dquo;
It
was these same younger warriors, moreover, who
younger
and
most readily to Christian teachings as presented to
earliest
responded
them in the village schools.6 Conversely, it was the village women who were
most resistent to Christian teachings, remaining devoted to local crop deities.61
The empires civil administration in the Naga Hills had an equally corrosive
effect on traditional village authority. The outstanding characteristic of
pre-British Naga polity-whether one looks at the Angamis with their
village councils whose members represented the village clan lineages, or the
more autocratic Semas, with their authority centralised in the figure of a
single village chief-was its face-to-face character. As long as there were no
codified legal norms, as long as there was no fixed, written reference by
which todays judgements could be compared with yesterdays, the fluid, ad
hoc nature of village policy served to sustain the authority of traditional
leaders. To be sure, the British attempted to prop up such local authority
both by granting village chiefs (in those villages that had chiefs, meaning
particularly the Semas) red blankets as symbols of their recognised, legitimate authority, and also by codifying the customary law of the Naga groups
for use in the district civil courts.62
But the latter policy, though conservative in motive, was radical in effect.
First, it provided villagers with a higher authority which could overrule the
decisions of their local chiefs or elders. Second, it changed the nature of
authority itself, for by establishing fixed, legal codes as the norms against

community organised

59

V.K. Anand, Nagaland in Transition, New Delhi, Associated Publishing House,1967, p. 93.
On the Mission Field, noted J.E. Tanquist in 1934, the spiritual reform movements
nearly always originate with the young people. Tanquist Papers, 1934, p. 203.
61
Mary Clark to J.W. Murdock, 5 Aug. 1880. American Baptist Foreign Mission Society,
Rochester, New York, Correspondence, Reel No. FM-59.
62
Anderson, History of the Contribution, p. 36.
60

22
which actions were to be judged, legal codification undermined the face-toface spontaneity by which village elites had formerly run things. And,
finally, in order to codify village customary law the British needed to employ
educated Naga interpreters, and it happened that many of these interpreters,
having been educated under the tutelage of missionaries, were Christians.
Though called upon to explain and codify the particular customs of the
various Naga groups they represented, these interpreters were at the same
time exposed to legal and religious systems which far transcended the village
boundaries in which they had been raised. This was probably why we find

government interpreters among so many prominent converts. The first


evangelists among the Chang, Sema, and Konyak Nagas, who together
over 100,000 people the majority of whom are Christians today,
American missionaries, but former government interpreters.63
But it would be a mistake to see the conversion of Nagas as merely a
function of social change. 64 To do so would involve, for one thing, explaining
the negative correlation between a communitys exposure to social change
and the extent of its conversion to Christianity. For example, although the
Angamis had been subjected to intense exposure to both Mission and
government-the headquarters of the Naga Hills District was located among
them at Kohima-they converted at a very slow rate relative to that of the
more isolated Semas, who were barely touched either by Mission or by
government (see Table 4).
If, on the other hand, one examines how the various Naga cosmologies
were related to the particular social situations in which they operated, and
then explores the manner in which the Christian cosmology was made to fit
into these various religious systems, a coherent explanation begins to emerge.
For the assumption in this essay is that apart from the affective and instrumental functions that all religions possess, there is an important cognitive
realm that feeds back into the society of its believers, providing that society
with the conceptual categories by which its immediate phenomenal world
might be explained, predicted, and controlled. 15 It is only by knowing the
nature of the Nagas cognitive realm that we can understand the capacity of
their conceptual categories to explain, predict, and control the phenomenal
social order they experienced, and the ways in which they responded to

comprise

were not

Christian religious categories.


63

Ibid., p. 50; Sema, Study of the Growth, pp. 55, 56.


A recent example of such an interpretation is found in Frederick S. Downs, Administrators,
Missionaries and a World Turned Upside Down: Christianity as a Tribal Response to Change in
North East India,
Indian Church History Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, December, 1981, pp. 99-113.
65
For more detailed discussions, though from somewhat different viewpoints, of the theoretical issues involved in using this framework, see Melford Spiro, Religion and the Irrational,
in June Helms (ed.), Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion, Seattle,
American Ethnological Society, 1964, pp. 102-15; Robin Horton, African Conversion and
On the Rationality of Conversion, see note 8 above; Jack Goody, Religion, Social Change,
and the Sociology of Conversion, in Jack Goody (ed.), Changing Social Structure in Ghana,
London, International African Institute, 1975, pp. 91-106.
64

23

There are two major variables in using this approach. First, one finds that,
in fact, Christianity was not presented uniformly among Naga groups, that
the Christian cosmology was fitted into the Ao religious system very differently than it was into the Sema or Angami systems. Second, one finds that
the various Naga communities experienced different sorts of social changes
before and during their exposure to Christian influence, and that this affected
their different responses to that influence. Accordingly, in the remainder of
this paper I will examine the Ao cosmological structure, its erosion during
the early twentieth century, and the way in which Christianity penetrated
that cosmology such that increasing numbers of Aos began identifying
themselves as Christians. The same will be done, more briefly, for two other
Naga groups who responded in differing ways to Christian proselytisation:
the Semas who converted very readily, and the Angamis who did not.
THE AO NAGAS
The supreme deity among the Ao Nagas, called Lungkijingba, was believed
to live high in the sky and to be concerned with the ultimate destiny of all
men.66 The precise nature of this deity, however, was apparently vague in
the minds of the Aos. J.P. Mills, writing in 1926, noted that Lungkijingba
appeared to be identical with Amangtsungba and also Mozing, the latter
being the King of the Dead.61 But, as Smith noted, this vagueness rested on
good reason; for while Lungkijingba exercised ultimate sovereignty over
men, he was so remote that his effective contact was not with men but with
the other deities. It was apparently due to this that Ao villages as a whole
made no offering to Lungkijingba, though individuals occasionally did.6&dquo;
That Lungkijingba exercised only theoretical power and not practical power
was also projected into Ao myths about the deity in relation to human

destiny:
He is

sitting upon the dome of his stone house as on a


pulls to pieces certain leaves, pronouncing on each
a
or
fate
destiny. The spirits of men come and each one picks up a
piece
of
and
the fate pronounced upon it becomes his lot in life. But
piece leaf,
since there is no mark on the piece of leaf, telling that particular destiny it
portends, the great god does not know what is to be the lot of each man; it
represented

as

throne, where he

resolves itself into

a mere

blind game of chance. 69

If the supreme deity was so remote as not to have possessed effective


control over mans ultimate destiny, not to say his everyday concerns, there
were other great deities who did. Foremost among these was Lizaba,
considered the creator of the earth and the deity in control of the rains and
66
67

68
69

Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, p.


Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 230.
Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, p.
Ibid., emphasis added.

78.
78.

24

consequently of the food supply for the rice-growing Aos. But Lizaba was
perceived not as a wholly benevolent deity, for he also commanded sickness
and disease, and into which houses they would go. 70 Living in closer relation
to man and his crops, then, Lizaba seems to have been more clearly defined
by the Aos than Lungkijingba, and most offerings and sacrifices were made
to him. Ao villages held annual ceremonies in his honour in June, during
which pigs would be sacrificed outside the village gates and eaten by the
officiating priests. Such a day of sacrifice was one of many Ao gennas, a
genna being a term used by all Nagas to denote a ritual holiday during which
certain activities were taboo. On this particular genna, for example, no one
could husk rice or fetch firewood from the stacks outside the village.&dquo;
Both Lungkijingba and Lizaba were called tsungrem by the Aos, that is,
spirits who, when given a name or identified with a place, were endowed
not only with power but personality, as opposed to other natural or superI

natural forces, such as the sun and the moon, which were also endowed with
power and worshipped accordingly, but not with personality. In this way
there were also in the heavens a number of sky deities called anung tsungrem
(sky tsungrem) with whom men had limited concern since they could do
little but cause hail by breaking up huge blocks of ice thrown down by
sky-folk yet above them?2 At the most local level there were house-site
spirits (kimung tsungrem), who were fixed beings that haunted the same
house-site no matter who occupied it; and house-spirits (ki-tsung tsungrem)
who were attached to individuals and moved with them wherever they
went?3 There were also jungle ghosts (arem tsungrem or aonglamla) who
were conceived as dwarf creatures with hair hanging to the ground, the sight
of whom was fatal to the unlucky observer. And, perhaps unique to the Ao
Nagas, was the belief in the power inhering to the many large stones which
rise up out of the jungle terrain of Ao country. When passing such stones in
the jungle, the Ao never spat on or jabbed with his spear these stones, for it
was felt that if disturbed they were likely to bring on bad storms.4
It is obvious, then, that the swarms of spirits which inhabited the everyday
world of the Ao Nagas were generally harmful, though ones house-spirit
might work for good as well as for evil. Elaborate ceremonies had therefore
to be performed to keep the various tsungrems at bay. As Mills wrote, On
their good will largely depend a mans health and happiness. They are
everywhere-in the village, in the beld, in the jungle, by streams, in trees,
and, most favourite haunt of all, in the huge boulders which were so
pumerous in the Ao country. 175 For concerns that affected the entire
70

Ibid.

71

Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 221.


Ibid., p. 223.
Ibid., p. 222; Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, pp. 77-78.
Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 217.
Ibid., p. 216.

72

73
74
75

25

village-war, pestilence, good crops, etc.-the higher tsungrems were


generally invoked, especially Lizaba, by village priests called putirs. Each
village consisted of a number of clans and each clan would have one of its
eldest males, chosen generally by public opinion, serving on the village
board of priests, who were amply compensated for their services on every
occasion of village feasts or sacrifices at which they officiated. Another set of
specialists was required for dealing with concerns affecting individuals in
their struggle with the swarms of malevolent spirits close at hand. Called
medicine men by Mills, diviners or soothsayers by Smith, and arasentsur
by the Aos themselves, these shaman-like specialists derived their importance from their ability to commune with the spirit world and thus to ascertain
what evil spirit was inflicting a specific power on the aggrieved individual, or
what spirit had temporarily seized the individuals spirit. Roughly speaking,
as Mills summed it up, the priests and private individuals acting as priests
carry on the normal religious life of the community, the &dquo;medicine-man&dquo;
being called in to deal with the abnormal.6
In its broad outline, the foregoing account sketches the main features of
early twentieth century Ao cosmology and how it interacted with Ao society.
As a system for explaining how the world works, two important features
should be noted. The first is its internal logic and self-sufficient rationality.
For example, the Ao explanation of a solar eclipse was that a hungry tiger
was eating the sun. To restore the sun to its proper condition, huge wardrums were beaten in order to frighten away the beast.&dquo; The cognitive
aspect of Naga religion, its capacity to predict, explain, and control the
phenomenal world, is nowhere better seen than in this case, for every time
the ritual of beating the drum was performed, the sun was returned to its
normal state. In sum, the belief explained the phenomenon, and the ritual
confirmed the belief.
The other salient feature of Ao cosmology was its close identification with
the Ao section of the Naga Hills and its inhabitants. Mary Clark recognised
this, writing in 1907 that as not many of the Aos have travelled beyond their
own country, their horizon embraces for them the world. 78 Her husband,
E.W.

Clark, made a similar observation in his Ao-Naga Dictionary (1911),

noting that:
Lizaba was accredited to have been the world maker. But the Aos never

travelled much beyond their own country and their horizon was supposed
to embrace all there was of the world, so though Lizaba has the credit of
being world maker, all he did (by tradition) was to level the surface of the
plain of the Assam Valley. 79
76
77
78
79

Ibid., p. 244.
Smith, Ao Nagas, p. 99.
Clark, Comer, p. 58.
E.W. Clark, Ao-Naga Dictionary, Calcutta, Baptist Mission Press, 1911, p.

350.

26/
Ao traditions concerning such things as their genealogical orgins were also

firmly tied to the Ao microcosm: their ancestors came out of the earth at six
stones located in

spur on the

right bank of the Dikhu River.

80 The

path to

paradise was similarly concretised on a particular long ridge, sloping from


west to east. 81 And also the spirits, or tsungrem, wrote Mills:
regarded as resembling the people of the locality in which they live.
For instance, should a sick man be told by the medicine man whom he
consults that it is a tsungrem of the Phom country [another Naga group, to
the east] which is holding his soul to ransom he will offer a little thread of
the kind which the Phom buy keenly from the Aos. Or should the patient
have been attacked by the Assamese tsungrem while trading on the plains
he will make his offering into two little bundles and attach them to a
miniature Assamese carrying pole, for an Assamese tsungrem would
naturally never use a Naga carrying poles
are

The extract also shows that while tsungrems could be localised geographically,
they could still be borrowed or adapted in some way by a neighbouring
people. The system, in other words, was inherently elastic, fluid, and

adaptive.
How

Christianity, then, presented and how did it relate to the Ao


cosmological structure? On this point we find that, for all their condemnation
of the social dimension of Naga religion, the American Baptists leaned very
heavily on its cosmological dimension. The old religion of these people
furnishes a splendid basis for Christianity, wrote E.W. Clark in 1881. The
fundamental ideas are there, perverted it is true, but there. And most of the
needful terms are there. 83 Accordingly, the Baptist pioneers among the
Nagas attempted to match important features of Christian doctrine with
corresponding features of the Ao system. Mary Clark was pleased to write
that the Aos believed in an individual soul and an afterlife, that they had as
notion of sin and a need for salvation, and that they had an apocalyptic vision
that closely approximated the Day of Judgement. 84 Therefore E.W. Clark,
when translating New Testament scripture into the Ao language, used the
was

Ao term for the Great Fire that is to end the world, molomi,to translate the
Biblical Judgement Day. Mills wrote that old men used to talk of this Great
Fire before the missionaries came, and described it as sweeping up the banks
of the Brahmaputra River to burn all that there is on earths He also
80

Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 6.
Hutton, Angami Nagas, p. 186.
82
Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 216.
83
E.W. Clark to J.W. Murdock, 10 March 1881. American Baptist Foreign Mission Society,
Rochester, New York, Correspondence, Reel No. FM-59.
84
Clark, Comer, pp. 57-63.
85
Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 100.
81

27

suggested that this belief was an important reason for the Aos hasty
acceptance of Christianity, for, he wrote, all Ao Christians firmly believe
that their non-Christian brethren

are

doomed

to

this terrible fate, and the

non-Christians are naturally inclined to think there may be something in


it. 186
More difficult than fitting points of Christian doctrine into the Nagas

cognitive categories was the vexing problem of fitting Christian superhuman


beings into the Nagas cosmological and linguistic structure. Here, I think, is
where we see the translators of scripture as pivotal figures. Would entities
such as God, god, Christ, Satan, Holy Ghost, or spirit be rendered in
the Hebrew, Greek, or English so that the Nagas would have to learn an
entirely new word for each concept, or would rough equivalents in the
various Naga languages be sought and used instead? The way this problem
was met, I would argue, had profound significance for the ultimate acceptability of Christianity among the Nagas. For mass conversion, whatever else
it may have meant, ultimately involved the transfer of certain ideas and
symbols from one cultural and linguistic framework into another such framework. The question must therefore be: what changes, if any, took place in
these ideas or symbols during the transfer? What did Nagas understand
when the missionaries thought they were translating these concepts or
entities into a Naga idiom?
In translating God for Ao scriptures, E.W. Clark and his Naga assistants
did not use the term standing for any single Ao deity-neither the Ao
supreme being, Lungkijingba, nor the important creator and crop deity
Lizaba. Nor was the foreign term Jihova used, at least not initially. Rather,
the Ao Bible translated both kyrios (Lord, master) and theos (god,
God) by the Ao word tsungrem, a word that denotes simply a spirit not
endowed with any specific attributes. It was, in other words, a generic term
and not a proper noun. Mills considered this a risky translation because
tsungrem means a spirit attached to a definite place, of a character which at
best is neutral and is always liable to be hostile . 8? But, and this is the critical
point, a tsungrem was attached to a place only when a word designating that
place was attached to the word tsungrem-e.g., anung tsungrem, sky
spirit; arem tsungrem, jungle spirit; or ki-tsung tsungrem, house spirit.
Otherwise, it was a neutral concept with no specific attributes. Thus by using
the generic term tsungrem for God, the missionaries were in effect pulling
together what the entire pantheon shared in common-its spirit-ness, or
tsungrem-ness-and endowing that notion with all the power, majesty,
transcendence, and universality of the Biblical supreme deity.8g This process
was identical with Max Webers idea of religious rationalisation, or the
86
87

Ibid., p. 413.
Ibid., p. 367.

88
As in English, French, etc., the proper noun God was always capitalised as
while the generic god was left in the lower case, tsungrem.

Tsungrem,

28/
process of elaborating and clarifying the supreme power of a single, universal
deity at the expense of all others. g9 At the level of the upper tier of the
two-tiered traditional Nagas cosmology, this process amounted to replacing
Lungkijingba, only vaguely perceived by the Aos, with a far more sharply
defined universalisation of the generic term, while simply liquidating the
entire lower tier of lesser spirits.
To be sure, not all the missionaries were agreed that the translation
procedure pioneered by Clark was the proper one, and in 1945 J.E. Tanquist
supervised a revised Ao New Testament which replaced Tsungrem with
Jihova.~ But, as Tanquist later admitted, the people were not enthusiastic
about the change, to say the least, and they continued to use the Ao term
Tsungrem.9 This only demonstrates how firmly entrenched the term had
become in the refurbished cosmology of the Ao Nagas. Yet it also gives us an
important clue in attempting to reconstruct how the conversion process
might have occurred in the first place. By using the term Tsungrem instead
of Jihova in the early editions of Christian scripture, Clark and his associates
at once utilised and enlarged an indigenous conceptual category instead or
imposing a foreign one on the people. This policy was not, of course, a cause
of conversion; it only facilitated that process when Ao Nagas began to give
increasing attention to the upper half of their two-tiered cosmology.
This greater attention to a supreme deity paralleled the multi-dimensional
integration of the Ao people with the outside world that occurred in the
twentieth century. Just as the advent of district courts undermined the
authority of local village elite-figures, so also this integration with a larger
world would not fail to have religious implications~-i.e., the discrediting of
village religious specialists and the lower tier of spirits which they served. If
those localised spirits no longer seemed to be in command of the much larger
universe in which many Nagas now lived, greater attention was given to the
upper tier. But Lungkijingba, who formerly occupied that tier, was vague,
distant, and inaccessible, while on the other hand Tsungrem as preached by
the American Baptists was clearly conceptualised as well as endowed with
greater authority and power than any other being in the Naga system. As
some old-timers recalled the preaching of Clark in the 1880s, it was the
89

The process of rationalisation ),


ratio wrote Weber, favoured the primacy of universal
(
gods; and every consistent crystallisation of a pantheon followed systematic rational principles
to some degree, since it was always influenced by professional sacerdotal rationalism or by the
rational striving for order on the part of secular individuals. Max Weber, The Sociology of
Religion, Boston, Beacon Press, 1963, p. 22.
It seems that Tanquist endeavoured to replace Tsungrem with Jihova at every opportunity. In the Bethel Seminary Archives is his personal copy of an Ao hymnbook in which every
Tsungrem is crossed out in pencil and in the margin is written Jihova. For a related discussion
90

130 below.
Letter of J.E.
to A.F. Merrill, Administrative Secretary, Public Relations
Department, American Baptist Convention, Riverside Drive, New York City, 8 March 1960.
Copy in authors possession.
see note
91

Tanquist

/29
infinite power and transcendence of the deity he preached, that struck them
&dquo;But when he (Clark] told us that his God could make eagles and
chickens roost in the same house, and tigers and cows walk the same path in
peace, we refused to believe him.92 An all-powerful being, such as Clark
preached, was hard for his listeners to imagine perhaps because he was not
then needed; their highly-elaborated lower tier of spirits apparently served
quite adequately to explain and predict the localised world in which they
most:

lived.
But the intellectual effects of imperial integration were becoming evident
early as the time of the Clarks. You should hear their exclamation of
wonder as they turn the pages of &dquo;Harpers Weekly&dquo;, wrote Mary Clark:
even as

They are in a world of which they never dreamed. When our missionary
map from Boston was hung up before them, Wah! wah! wah! father,
what does it speak? uttered in reverent exclamation gave opportunity for
such a lesson as led old Deacon Scubungallumba to drop his head and
mutter almost under his breath, Ish, Ish! how great we have thought
ourselves, as though we were the big part of all creation.93
This passage suggests that a certain amount of cognitive disruption occurred
as the confines of ones world became enlarged so suddenly and so drastically.
What yesterday had been the entire universe, bounded by a distant mountain
range, was now but a speck on a vast globe.
Such disruption, or just uncertainty about how the cosmos was ordered,
became more evident in the twentieth century. Writing in 1925, just when
the spectacular increase in conversion among the Aos had begun, the
sociologist and former missionary William C. Smith noted a change in how
the Aos conceived the afterworld. The British prohibition on headhunting in
this life, wrote Smith, tended to confuse their ideas about the status of the
practice in the next life. 94 Even more significant were Smiths remarks
concerning the effects of British rule on the Aos perception of their important
crop deity, Lizaba, and his degree of activity in the affairs of the world.
Lizaba traditionally played a critical role in the everyday affairs of men
inasmuch as he had charge of the rains, and hence the food supply, and also
of sickness and disease. Most village-wide offerings consequently went to
him. It was believed that in the old days, before the British annexation in
1889, Lizaba used to manifest himself once or twice a year, visiting certain
Ao villages where he would bring portents of coming events such as smallpox,
good harvests, war, and so forth. But since the advent of British rule, noted
Smith, Lizaba has not appeared. They say he has gone on a journey to the
ends of the world.95 For the Aos in the 1920s, formerly important
92

Oral

93

Clark, Corner, p. 108.


Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, p. 102.

94

testimony given in 1929 to B.I. Anderson, cited in his New Way, p.

14.
95

Ibid., p. 79.

30/

superhuman agencies seemed to be no longer in charge of things, or at least


not as actively involved with the world as they formerly were.
Amidst this breakdown and ultimately capitalising on it, were the missionaries and their youthful teacher-converts who claimed to be tapping a
source of power, the one god Tsungrem, far greater in magnitude and far
more actively involved with the entire macrocosm than any of the former
spirits of Ao cosmology. The acceptance of this Christian conception of God
seems to have been facilitated by (a) his ability to deliver men from fear of
their malevolent spirits; (b) his identification with new solutions to old
problems in the area of physical afflictions; and (c) his infinite power
rendered both timeless and unchallengeable by his being enshrined in a
written text, the Christian scriptures.
One aspect of the first of these-the Christian deitys perceived ability to
deliver men from fear of malevolent spirits―was the perceived failure of
feared superhuman agencies to deliver the sort of harm traditionally associated with them. For example, it was believed that if the property of
anybody dying an unnatural death were not destroyed, certain spirits would
work evil on persons handling that property. Accordingly, when in the
Christian village of Molung a woman was killed by a tiger, the villagers were
confronted with the potentially dangerous consequences of working the
fields of the afflicted family. When they ultimately did work those fields, and
no untoward incident ensued, the credibility of the old system correspondingly dropped while the villagers faith in the more powerful God
preached by Clark was correspondingly confirmed.96 Another case in point:
E.W. Clark was once warned of a mighty and influential spirit dwelling in a
large boulder around which a certain footpath abruptly detoured. After
Clark to the amazement of his attendants walked back and forth unharmed
before the sacred boulder, a new, more direct path was soon blazed passing
directly by the rock.97 One more Ao deity had thereby been discredited. A

study made of Naga converts suggests that the deliverance from


spirits continues to be an important factor in the spread of
Christianity today, many informants reporting their terrible fear of evil
spirits when in their old religion.98 All of this finds striking parallel in what
Peter Brown has written concerning the spread of Christianity in Europe in
late Antiquity. From the New Testament onwards, he writes, the Christian
The Church was the
mission was a mission of &dquo;driving out&dquo; demons
his
limitless
whom
Satan
had
been
bound:
for
powers had been
community
bridled to permit the triumph of the Gospel.99
recent

fearsome

....

96
97

Clark, Corner, pp. 60-61.


Ibid., p. 59.

Puthuvail T. Philip, The Growth of the Baptist Churches of Tribal Nagaland, M.A. in
Missiology thesis, Fuller Theological Seminary, 1972, p. 154.
Peter Brown, Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity into the
Middle Ages, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusations, London,
98

99

Tavistock, 1970, p. 31.

/31

Secondly, Christianity was also associated with new, powerful techniques


for dealing with physical pain or disease. That missionaries to the Nagas
carried with them the latest medicines Western technology had to offer
naturally encouraged this association. The matter was put most simply by
Sidney Rivenburg: When I go out to preach, a Scripture portion, hymn
book, pills, quinine, chlorodine and painkiller are my weapons of warfare.
Records show that while on tour in distant villages, missionaries distributed
medical supplies as a matter of course. 101 As one result of this intrusion of
Western medicine, we find evidence even in Clarks day that the credibility
of village shamans, who traditionally dealt with those spirits inflicting physical
pain on individuals, was severely undermined. 112
Once the association between Christianity and healing had become sufficiently complete in the minds of the villagers--a process initially strengthened
by a prior association of Western medicine with missionaries--conversion in
the context of healing could and did take place without Western medicine
playing any role at all. The new religion became itself a technique, a remedy.
And, as J.D.Y. Peel has observed, the more religion is regarded as a
technique, whose effectiveness the individual may estimate for himself, the
readier will the individual be to try out other techniques which seem
promising. &dquo;13 Thus we hear an old mans reply when asked about his sore
foot: I have become a Christian, but my foot is no better.I04 The same
process occurred at the level of entire groups. In one village a woman
became desperately ill and the shamans methods of treating her-sacrifices
of pigs and chickens, tearing banana leaves, etc.-were all tried without
success. Finally the villagers decided to try prayer to the Christian God and
agreed that should she get well, they would all become Christian; and if not,
they would remain unconverted. The woman recovered, and the entire
village kept its vow. 105 In the cases cited, Western medicine was not involved
at all; rather, the people were tapping the vast resources of what Mary Clark
called the power-filled doctrine.
Finally, the most significant cognitive dimension to the introduction of
Christianity among the Nagas is that it was accompanied with literacy, and
100

Cited in Tanquist Papers, 1936, p. 230. The matter was put more cynically in the Missions
annual report for 1923: Because they must worship something, they bow down to a stone, or a
nat, or a medical missionary, who has cured their bodies of painful and seemingly, fatal
diseases. American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 109th Annual Report,
1923, p. 112.
101
B.I. Andersons personal record of a 1929 tour indicates both the need and the response:
The next stop was at a Sema village near the road. There were no converts to welcome us, but
plenty of villagers who came to ask for medicine and to beg for a teacher. The medicine supply
was sufficient for malaria fever, intestinal worms, iodine applications for festering wounds,
drops for inflamed eyes and even painkiller for what we could not diagnose.New Way, p. 7.
102
Smith, Ao Naga Tribe, p. 189.
103
J.D.Y. Peel, Syncretism and Religious Change, Comparative Studies in Society and

History, 10, 1967-68, pp. 124-25.


104
Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 411.
105
Victor H. Sword, Baptists in Assam, Chicago, Conference Press, 1935, p. 115.

32/
that the very first literature presented to them was Christian scripture. It is in
this sense that we see, returning to the theme suggested in the opening pages
of this paper, the missionaries as emissaries of the high culture of the plains
bringing the written word to the forest. Many centuries earlier the Brahmins
had done a similar service for other forest peoples in parts of India now
mainly Hindu. So had Buddhist monks, and at a later period, Muslim judges
and holy men brought the written word to Indias aboriginals. The fact that
aboriginals were more vulnerable to Christian proselytisation than were
members of literate religious traditions, was well known to missionaries. As
early as 1876, E.W. Clark wrote that it is a well-recognised fact in India that
aboriginal tribes like the Nagas who are not Hindu, Mussalman or Buddhists
constitute by far the most promising field of missionary labor in India.6
The immense impact that the introduction of literacy could have on the
religious outlook of pre-literate societies was well expressed by J.D.Y. Peel:
In non-literate societies
the past is perceived as entirely servant of the
needs of the present, things are forgotten and myth is constructed to
justify contemporary arrangements; there are no dictionary definitions of
words.... In religion there is no sense of impersonal or universal
orthodoxy of doctrine; legitimate belief is as a particular priest or elder
expounds it. But where the essence of religion is the Word of God, where
all arguments are resolved by an appeal to an unchangeable written
authority, where those who formulate new beliefs at a time of crisis
commit themselves by writing and publishing pamphlets
religion
acquires a rigid basis. Structural amnesia is hardly possible; what was
thought in the past commits men to particular courses of action in the
present; religion comes to be thought of as a system of rules, emanating
from an absolute and universal God, which are quite external to the
thinker, and to which he must conform and bend himself, if he would be
saved
...

...

Lizaba may disappear beyond the mountains; forest spirits may rise or fall in
their capacity to do harm depending on a peoples ad hoc experiences with
them; potent tsungrems of one generation may be ignored by the next. But
Tsungrem, the one supreme deity preached by the Christians, possessed a
fixed and unalterable status in the cosmos. His commands and his promises,
frozen in time by the magical power of the written word, could not easily be

ignored or forgotten.
Missionaries witnessing this revolution of literacy seem to have been
vaguely aware of its enormous impact. In 1944, for example, the first
literature ever printed in the Rengma Naga language (apart from a songbook)
106

E.W. Clark to J.W. Murdock, 17 May 1876. American Baptist Foreign Mission Society,
Rochester, New York, Correspondence, Reel No. FM-59.
107

Peel, Syncretism, pp.

139-40.

/33

printed in 400 copies and disseminated among Rengma villages. This


the Book of Matthew, in large type. The few who can read, reported
the missionary-translator, will recite all the words to the many who are
illiterate. 108 Here we see the fusion of religion and literacy-the youth
was

was

coming as a primary school teacher to the distant village in the forest,


carrying with him the power-filled doctrine made tangible in the form of a
Book, and reciting to the villagers the unchanging and unchangeable Word
of God.
In the

early days of British rule in the Naga Hills, when Lizaba was still
perceived as actively involved in keeping the Aos world intact, these words
had relatively little effect, judging from the low incidence of conversion. But
in time, just as the district courts provided a fixed reference point of
authority which undermined the more fluid, ad hoc style of the village chiefs
or elders, so also the religion of the Book pro,vided another fixed reference
point, undermining the legitimacy of the more ad hoc and flexible spirits
with whom Nagas had formerly interacted. Hence the incorporation of the
Naga Hills into a larger political and economic network was paralleled by the
Aos incorporation of a more powerful and permanent supreme deity into
their cosmology. For this supreme deity was not an alien god imposed upon
the Aos from the outside; it was their own generic term made universal by
the Bibles message, and made permanent by the Bibles medium.
THE SEMA NAGAS
Using the above analysis of the Ao conversion as a basis for comparison or
contrast, the remainder of this paper briefly discusses the differing responses
of two other Naga groups exposed to Christian influence-the Semas and
the Angamis. The Aos and the Angamis occupy the northern and southern
sectors of Nagaland respectively, with the mission stations of Impur and
Kohima being located in the heart of each community. The Semas occupy a
territory in between these two, relatively distant from both mission stations.
Despite this, the Semas converted to Christianity at an astonishingly rapid
rate (see Table 4) with virtually no direct missionary influence brought to
bear on them. On the other hand the Angamis, though long exposed to
mission influence, converted at a relatively much slower rate than did either
the Aos or the Semas. Even in 1961 the size of the Angami Christian
community stood at just 40 per cent of all Angamis, which was among the
lowest such percentages of all the fourteen Naga communities. By contrast,
the corresponding percentages for the Ao and Sema communities were 98
per cent and 77 per cent respectively. 109 How, then, can one explain the
different Sema and Angami responses?
Looking back to the period 1915-1920 when he was compiling information
for his monograph on the Semas, J.H. Hutton later recalled there being only
108
109

Tanquist Papers, 1944, pp. 328-29.


Philip, Growth, p. 191.

34/:
small Christian village and only a few scattered Christian households in
villages along the roads leading into the Sema country. 110 In the mid-1920s,
though, a missionary from Impur, J. R. Bailey, made a tour of this region
and found many Christian groups with their own meeting houses, holding
regular services without visible leadership. This appeared so strange to him
that he feared to take active steps towards baptising the converts or organising
them in a more regular way. Later, the senior missionary on the other side of
the Sema territory, J.E. Tanquist of Kohima, toured the same territory and
reported seeing marvels of spiritual transformation the likes of which I have
never seen before-villages where around sixty households were Christian,
who had been worshipping for three or four years without leadership and
without ever having seen communion conducted. i i From about this time
Sema-speaking boys educated in either the Impur or the Kohima training
schools were sent as teacher-pastors back into the Sema country where they
organised Christian communities into churches. A 1938 field report could
say that all Sema villages to which such teachers had been sent were by then
totally Christian. &dquo;2
The key to this spectacular growth lay in developments taking place in
both the socio-political and the religious systems of the Semas at the time of
their exposure to Christian teachers. Unlike the Aos political system of
village councils composed of elders representing various clans, Sema villages
were generally ruled by an autocratic chief who belonged to a single ruling
lineage that extended throughout the Sema country. These powerful chiefs
directed the villages in war, decided all matters of relations with other
their
villages, and determined which lands the village (which practised
rotational slash-and..bum agriculture as a unit) would cultivate. 113 A chief s
authority derived from a system of reciprocal ties he had with dependent
warrior families in the village: in return for receiving from the chief land,
wives and food when necessary, the dependents gave the chief obeisance
(calling him father, for example), a regular amount of labour in the chiefss
personal fields, the leg of any animal slaughtered in sacrifice, and help in
war. Although such a dependent had no kin ties with the chiefs, he did have
a generally recognised obligation
to remain in the village of his chief,
whether he likes it or not. And should a dependent flee his village, the chief
confiscated all the dependents property. 114 Hence Hutton used the terms
serfs or bound retainers when referring to these people . 1 15
one

...

110
John H. Hutton, The Sema Nagas, London, Oxford University Press, 1968, Preface to the
second edition.
111
Tanquist Papers, 1936, pp. 240-41.
112
B.I. Anderson, Report for the Year 1938, Impur, in B.I. Anderson File, Bethel
Seminary Archives, St. Paul, Minnesota.
113
Hutton, Sema Nagas, p. 150.
114
Ibid., pp. 144-46.
115
John H. Hutton, The Mixed Culture of the Naga Tribes,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 95, 1965, p. 33.

/35
This political system was closely interrelated with another feature of Sema
culture: their tendency to migrate, colonise new villages, or conquer villages
belonging to other Naga communities. Indeed, the Semas were perhaps the
most migratory of all Nagas. For even though they followed a general
principle of primogeniture, by which a chiefs eldest son succeeded his
father, the former chief s other sons and brothers also had claims on the
lands and the labour belonging to the chief. Hence, a chief constantly
endeavoured to expand by giving a number of his retainers to his kin, who
would then colonise new villages or conquer old ones, themselves becoming
chiefs in the process. Wrote Hutton:

The authority of a Sema chief is quickly sapped when he can no longer


shed off his brothers and sons to found new villages with retainers of their
own. In such circumstances he ceases in a generation to be socially
distinct from others of his family, and a decline in his political authority
follows as a matter of course. 1166

Accordingly, the Semas expanded quite readily: the 1891 Census, for
example, reported their occupation of the large Tizu Valley within the last
thirty or forty years, and noted the severe pressure they had recently put on
the southern Ao country. 117
It

can

be

seen

that the need to

expand,

inasmuch

as

such

expansion

involved the use of force against Semas or non-Semas, ran directly counter
to the ideology of Pax Britannica in India. For in 1906 the western Sema
country was annexed, and by 1921 the area up to the Tizu River, which
included the great majority of the Sema population, had been added to the
Naga Hills District. This situation placed severe strains on those chiefs living
within imperial territory since they no longer had the option of expansion.
Writing in 1921, just before the political system began to unravel, the
Deputy Commissioner observed that particularly where the ability to
throw off colonies has ceased, meaning the British-administered area, the
death of a chief invariably entails squabbles between his sons or brothers, or
both.&dquo;8 Ultimately, this inability to shed brothers and sons diluted any
single chiefs autocratic authority over the mass of villagers who were his
dependents. It is in this context that we hear British officials in the 1930s
voicing the opinion that the rapid conversion movement of that time was at
bottom political, that is, that the people hoped to break away from allegiance
to their chiefs. 119 Missionary accounts record severe persecution of converts
116
117

Ibid., p. 23.
Census of India, 1891, Assam, Vol. 1,

p. 246. The process of expelling Ao villages went


right down to the annexation of the country by Government, which alone saved the Aos
from being driven north and west of Mokokchung. Hutton, Sema Nagas, p. 17.
on

118

119

Hutton, Sema Nagas, p. 148.


Tanquist Papers, 1936, p. 240.

36/

by village chiefs who in some cases drove Christians out of the villages and
into the forest where they formed small groups living on roots, leaves and
occasional gifts of rice from other Christians.
Evidently, Sema chiefs were caught in the old dilemma of trying to
maintain village cohesion while also coming to terms with the various forces
of change in the air. This is vividly reflected in a field report of Bengt
Anderson, who in 1931 visited a large, 300-house village whose powerful
chief was a well-known opponent of Christian teachings. The old chief,
120

Anderson wrote
gave me a cup of strong black coffee and two boiled eggs. My helpers got a
bowlful of rice and pork. When we had eaten, or tried to, the old man
opened up his heart. He told me of the older times when his village was
strong and his people were headhunters. Then he told me of how the
government came and now the Mission had also come to teach them a
new religion, breaking up all their old customs. Now the Christians did
not drink nor take part in the old war dances. Many of them refused to
pay the proper respect to their chief and some of them wanted to wear
blankets that only the wealthy were allowed to wear formerly, etc. I tried
to show him that all the customs they had formerly kept would not save
their souls and that those customs that did not pertain to devil worship,
we would not change.
The old warrior listened to me and then to my great surprise he asked if
we would give his village a teacher. This was sudden and unexpected as
we knew he had declared that no teacher would ever be allowed to come
in. We were very happy and the promise was gladly given. 1211

Why did the old chief give in? A clue is provided a few sentences later when
Anderson related that the chiefs younger brother had been baptised only a
year earlier and had been a leader among the Christians ever since. Obviously,
then, here is a case of a Sema chief unable to shed his kin from the village
thereby to monopolise the villages dependent families for his own service.
Not only that, but the brother converted to Christianity and became a leader
among a large section of the villages retainer population. Becoming more
isolated politically, and faced with ideological splits as well as splits within
his own family, the old man did the one thing that could diffuse the highly
polarised atmosphere short of converting to Christianity himself: he allowed
the Christian teacher into the village.
During the 1930s we hear of repeated cases not only of brothers and sons
of chiefs, but of chiefs themselves, converting to Christianity. By 1939
Anderson could write that whereas
120

ten years earlier the chiefs had shown

American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 116th Annual Report, 1930, p. 120.
B.I. Anderson, On Tour in the Naga Hills, in B.I. Anderson Papers, Bethel Seminary
Archives, St. Paul, Minnesota, p. 3.
121

/37
extreme hostility to the Mission, they have now become converted and most
of them are very loyal and a good many of them spiritual leaders as well.&dquo; 12
This statement indicates that although we know that some chiefs lost their
former standing by converting, 123 most did not. But if the old ruling lineage
did manage to remain intact, it was not in the 1940s the sort of autocratic or
arbitrary institution it had earlier been, and which had instigated the conflicts
of the 1920s. For the intrusion of British courts into village affairs served to
curb the authority of village chiefs just as in the Ao country it had curbed the
authority of the village councils. As a result, the Semas emerged from the
mass conversion movement with converted chiefs and converted retainers,
but with the social distance between the two considerably reduced.
Just as Sema society was not static at the time of the British annexation,
but dynamic and expansive, so also Sema cosmology had been undergoing
its own independent evolution by the time missionaries encountered the
community. Referring in particular to Ao and Sangtam Nagas whom the
Semas had moved against and to some extent assimilated as dependent
retainers, Hutton noted that the Sema seems to have depended very often
on the indigenous inhabitants whom he had assimilated for his ritual and
ceremonial in magico-religious practices This much one might expect for
such a migratory people lacking a literary basis to their religious structure.
More significant was the Semas attention to a supreme deity. While not
denying the traditional Naga belief in a host of lesser spirits all of which
needed propitiation, the Semas, more clearly and with greater elaboration
than other Nagas, affirmed the existence of a single, over-arching supreme
god named Alhou. As Hutton wrote in 1921,

Omniscience and omnipotence are vaguely ascribed to Him, and though


He is remote and inaccessible, He seems to be all-good as well as almighty
and all-knowing.... Alhou is the supreme dispenser of good and evil,
and it is He who makes men rich or poor. 125
Elsewhere Hutton noted that some Semas did not locate Alhou in any
particular quarter in the cosmos-an anthropomorphic conception
122
The most spectacular case is that of Inaho, the young chief of Lumitsami, a large village in
the northern Sema country. Although Inaho had begun his career by persecuting the Christian
minority in his village, he eventually joined the mass movement himself. And in 1929, when
Anderson met Inaho for the first time, the Sema chief shed all his distinctive attire—a bright
sash draping his chest, heavy ivory armlets, a necklace of bear tusks, brass earrings, and a
bearskin headdress with black and white feathers-declaring his desire to become an evangelist.
This he did, baptising thousands of his fellow Semas in the 1930s and 1940s, and serving on at
least one occasion (1937) as Chairman of the Sema Association. Anderson, New Way, pp.
9-10; Tanquist Papers, 1936, p. 241; B.I. Anderson, A January Story, in Anderson Papers, p. 3.
123
Inaho, the chief mentioned in note 122 above, was willing to give up his second wife and a
share of his property, as well as his status as chief. Ibid.
good
125
124
Ibid., p. 194.
Hutton, Sema Nagas, Preface to the second edition.

38
characteristic of most Naga superhuman agencies-but rather in all space
between heaven and earth. Hutton went on to say, and I have heard a Sema
attribute to Him the quality of omnipresence, even if not of absolute infinity,
though the Sema in question was not educated or even semi-christinised. 126
The supreme god Alhou, then, emerges an altogether different sort of being
than the Aos Lungkijingba: he was more sharply conceptualised, more
powerful, and was more actively involved in the everyday affairs of the
Sema. This last point is reflected in Sema folklore in which mens fortune in
, life is specifically perceived as lying within the will of Alhou. 127
The first scripture published in Sema was the Book of Mark, translated by
J.E. Tanquist of Kohima in 1928.128 Thereafter more scripture came out
piece-meal, the entire New Testament appearing in 1950. Especially popular
with the Semas, as with other Nagas, were hymn books, for singing was a
favourite vehicle for popular Christian devotionalism with all Naga communities. 129 In all this literature we find that the Christian God was not, as in
the Ao case, translated by the generic word for spirit. Rather, it was
decided simply to identify the Christian supreme deity with the Sema supreme
deity, Alhou. 130 This was a decision of considerable importance, for its effect
was greatly to facilitate the cognitive transfer from the old religion to the
new. More correctly, by using the Sema supreme deitys name to stand for
the Christian supreme deity, as opposed to planting a foreign word into the
language, there never really occurred a transfer at all, but only a greater
refinement and elaboration of the Semas conception. Above all, we should
note that the translated scripture, hymn books, etc., gave this conception
the tremendous authority and permanence of the written word, as happened
in all Naga languages reduced to writing.
The conversion of the Semas, in sum, had interrelated social and intellectual dimensions. As for the latter, the supreme god Alhou had already
become important for Semas even before the British arrived on the scene,
possibly because their semi-migratory ways disposed them not to place
relatively as much emphasis on local cults or spirits identified with the
microcosm, but to concentrate more on the one deity who transcends all
microcosms. Seen in this light, the coming of Christianity-particularly by
126
127
128
129

Ibid., p. 191n.
Ibid., p. 194.
Sema, Study of the Growth, p. 46.
Mills wrote that among the Aos

going to church is usually spoken of as going to sing.

Mills, Ao Nagas, p. 418.


130
J.E. Tanquist, the first translator of scripture into Sema, doubtless recognised the
remarkable theological similarity between the two conceptions, though his Sema assistants
would surely have seen the same similarity and urged that the policy be adopted. The missionarys
policy in this matter, however, is not consistent with his policy respecting translation of
scripture into Angami. For it was about this time, the mid-1920s, that he urged the translation of
God as Jihova in Angami scripture. Later, by the mid-1940s, he urged this mode of
translation among all linguistic groups of the Naga Hills. Tanquist Papers, 1944-45, p. 350.

/39

identifying its God with Alhou-rode the coattails of an indigenous religious


movement. Nor was this all. This identification of supreme deities occurred
at a moment of rising tension in the Semas social order, inadvertently

brought on by the logic of Pax Britannica. Yet even though it was prevented
from expanding in a territorial sense, Sema society continued to expand in
another sense, a sense for which greater concentration on the supreme god
Alhou was cognitively appropriate. Like the Aos, Semas educated in village
schools soon became a new elite integrated into a wider political and
economic system that greatly broadened their vision of the world. It was no
accident that Bengt Anderson listed among the leading church workers the
clerks in the Kohima and Mokokchung government offices, the teachers in
government schools, and the interpreters serving in the courts. 1311
THE ANGAMI NAGAS
Despite their relatively high exposure to the influences of both Mission and
government, the Angami Nagas converted to Christianity at a far slower rate
than did the Aos or the Semas (see Table 4). I have argued that in the case of
the latter groups, conversion was greatly stimulated by the association of
Christianity with education and literacy, its association with Western
medicine, and the integration of the country into the Anglo-Indian Empire.
But these same forces were also present among the Angamis. Their strikingly
slower rate of religious change therefore remains to be explained, and
compels us to examine closely what factors in Angami culture or in the
presentation of Christianity to the Angamis, might have hindered the conversion process. One finds two clues: the distinctive way the Angami Nagas
adapted themselves to the land, and the means chosen by missionaries to
mesh Christian cosmological conceptions with Angami conceptions.
As to the first of these, it has been observed that the Angamis, alone
among the Nagas, did not practise a slash-and-bum type of agriculture as did
their neighbours, but rather built elaborate systems of terracing and irrigation
by which steep hills were transformed into flooded rice-fields.32 As one
result of this system of agriculture, the population tended to be more tied to
the land than did the practitioners of slash-and-bum agriculture, who constantly moved and competed with each other for land usage. Slash-and-burn
practising Nagas therefore tended to be somewhat more migratory than the
Angamis, and therefore more accustomed to assimilating each others cults
and religious practices. Both the Aos and the Semas, as we have seen, had
quite fluid cosmological systems capable of grafting new deities or names of
deities into their systems. But the Angamis seem to have had a relatively
more stable religious system than other Nagas, just as their agricultural
system was more stable. We do not find the Angamis readily absorbing, for
131

Anderson, New Way, p. 50.


British officials always admired the Angami practice of wet-rice cultivation and encouraged
the other Nagas to adopt it because of its far more intensive use of limited land area.
132

40/

example, Sema cults or practices. Moreover, the chief Angami deities


relating to agriculture-Ukepenopfu, the supreme goddess, and Maweno,
the goddess of fruitfulness-are both feminine. The association of feminine
deities with agricultural fertility normally reflects relatively stabilised religious
as well as ecological systems. And to the degree these systems were more
stable, they were also more resistant to change.
The second factor inhibiting the reception of Christianity among the
Angamis flows from the first. I have argued that one factor facilitating,
though not causing, the acceptance of Christianity among the Aos and
Semas was precisely that Christian concepts were made to mesh with Ao and
Sema cosmologies in ways that were not only compatible with those cosmologies, but actually served to increase their capacity to explain and
predict the world as experienced. Thus Tsungrem for the Aos represented
an inflation of a generic word for spirit into an all-embracing supreme
deity. And Alhou of the Semas was an existing supreme god made even
more powerful by its identification with the Judeo-Christian deity. But the
translation of scriptural names into Angami not only failed to infuse a degree
of growth into Angami cosmology; it contradicted that cosmology in basic
ways. Moreover, it contradicted itself.
The first Christian scripture to appear in Angami was the Book of Matthew,
translated by Stanley Rivenburg and published in 1890. The Books of Acts
and John also appeared about this time. In these translations Rivenburg
used the foreign word Ihova not only for the supreme deity of the New
Testament, but also for the generic term god.33 So, apart from the difficulty
of imposing a foreign word on Angami cosmology-itself a departure from
the policy used vis-a-vis Aos and Semas-Rivenburg failed to distinguish the

personal term God from the generic term god.34 In 1892 he published a
hymnbook in which the same terminology was employed. The same year
Rivenburg returned to the United States on furlough, broken in health and
utterly discouraged, having spent five years in Kohima without making a
single Angami convert.
In 1918 the fourth missionary sent to Kohima, J.E. Tanquist, published a
translation of the Book of Revelation that broke new ground in the presentation of Christianity to the Angamis. Although he was far from proficient
in the Angami language at that time, Tanquist and his Angami pundit made
a translation of the Book of Revelation into what Tanquist later described as
&dquo;admittedly more idiomatic Angami than that of other scripture then in
~35

133

Letter of J.E. Tanquist to A.F Merrill, see note 89 above.


Acts 14 : 11, then, instead of reading These people are gods who have come down to us
disguised as men, would have to read These people are Ihovas who have come down....
135
Rivenburg, Star, p. 85. While on furlough he took a medical degree at Baltimore Medical
College, returning to the Angamis in 1894 to practise medicine as well as to evangelise. In 1901
his wife wrote that the Angamis 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. Ibid., p. 91.
134

/41
circulation. 136 In this translation Tanquist translated God as Ukepenopfu,
the Angami female supreme deity. The missionary did not realise at the time
that the ending pfu was a feminine ending, but he did know that the name
Ihova, introduced by his colleague Stanley Rivenburg, had not taken very
deep root in the consciousness of the Angamis. 1ova, after all, was an
entirely foreign word, whereas Ukepenopfu was of course already familiar
among the Angamis. It was for that reason that Tanquist hoped it would be
accepted as the equivalent for the Christian God. 1J7 One thousand copies
of Tanquists version of Revelation were printed and disseminated in village
schools where it was used as a reader in Angami.
In adopting this policy, Tanquist was in one sense following the practice
adopted for the Semas, for Ukepenopfu and Alhou were the supreme deities
in Angami and Sema cosmologies respectively. But whereas the latter is
masculine, Ukepenopfu was feminine. Angamis in fact regarded her as the
ancestress of the human race, and in Angami folklore the belief is elaborated
that the younger son of Ukepenopfu went off with his wise father and begat
the clever peoples of the Indian plains, whereas the elder son ran off to the
hills and begat the Nagas.3~ This story both affirms Ukepenopfus identity
as a female figure and explains why a father of the Angamis is absent in
their cosmological system.
In time, Tanquist came to question the wisdom of using the name of a
female goddess to translate the Biblical God the Father, so clearly masculine
in the Old and New Testaments. Eventually he and Rivenburg, who remained
in the field until 1922, became

fully agreed that the- beloved name, which could have the meaning the
female who gave us birth, or She who is near us signified a goddess at
the least, and however manipulated and explained (e.g., they would in
the course of time come to regard the name as masculine) all sorts of
linguistic and theological difficulties would be encountered both in the
New Testament and the Old.39
But

perhaps it was by now too late. In 1921 Hutton observed that Ukepenopfu
the word used by Christian converts for their anthropomorphic conception of God the Father. He also noted that the conception of Ukepenopfu
in the Angami mind was apparently at present undergoing a process of
change from female to male.&dquo;10 Presumably Huttons informants were
either converts themselves, or Angamis who had been exposed to Christian
influence in some way-for example, by having read Tanquists translation
of Revelation in village schools.
was

136

Letter of J.E.

137

Ibid.
Letter of J.E. Tanquist to A.F. Merrill,
Hutton, Angami Nagas, p. 181n.

139

140

Tanquist to A.F. Merrill, see note 91


138

above.

Hutton, Angami Nagas, pp. 180, 260-61.

see note

91 above.

42/
Be that as it may, the decision was now made to abandon Ukepenopfuwhich, if Hutton was right must have confused converts who now perceived
the former goddess as God the Father-and to reinstate Ihova, now spelled
Jihova, as the proper translation of the Christian supreme being. This was
done in a simplified version of the Book of Genesis that appeared in 1923. In
1927 the complete Angami New Testament appeared for the first time; it
also used Jihova, as have all subsequent editions.
My argument, then, is that if Mission translation policy followed a course
that was admirably suited to find a response in the Ao and Sema contexts, it
followed the opposite course in the Angami context. Neither Jihova nor
Ukepenopfu was an easily assimilable translation for the Christian God:
the one was an entirely foreign word and the other posed a serious contradiction in gender between the words new and old associations. Vacillating
between the two terms, moreover, could only compound the problem. To
make matters still worse, the generic word for spirit (terhoma), whose
equivalent in the Ao language (tsungrem) was elevated to stand for God, in
the Angami was demoted to stand for Satan. The missionaries, as Hutton
noted, teach the Angami convert to regard all terhoma as evil, and missiontaught Nagas are in the habit of translating the generic terhoma into English
or Assamese as &dquo;Satan&dquo;.4
Conclusion

This paper has discussed patterns of conversion among three Naga communities : the Aos, the Semas, and the Angamis. However much these
patterns may have differed from one community to another, there was one
respect in which the religious development of all three communities was
similar. It will be noted from Table 2 that the Christian percentage of the
total Naga population jumped by its highest margin ever in the decade of
World War II-from 17.9 per cent in 1941 to 45.7 per cent in 1951. And it can
be seen from Table 4 that all three communities, including even the Angamis,
saw their fastest spurt of conversion during the War. Why was this so?
Despite its administrative integration with the rest of British India, prior
to World War II the Naga Hills District had been comparatively cut off from
the rest of the world. Then suddenly the region was engulfed into the chaos
of modem mechanised warfare. In fact between 1942 and 1944 the Naga
Hills became a major theatre of the conflict, culminating in March 1944,
when three Japanese divisions slammed through the rugged Burma-India
frontier and launched massive attacks on Kohima and Imphal. After weeks
of heavy fighting the Japanese began to break, and by July were driven from
India. But not without having caused grievous hardship to the Nagas, whose
villages had been pillaged, destroyed or occupied, and who themselves were
141

Ibid., p. 180.

/43

often tortured or executed by the Japanese. 142 Dramatic changes were also
taking place in peoples religious behaviour. In the Angami country Tanquist
was amazed to note that whereas contributions to the Bible Society normally
averaged around Rs 50 per church annually, in 1943 that figure soared to an
average of Rs 900 per church. Whereas normally 150 copies of the Angami
New Testament were sold annually, in 1943, 750 copies were snapped up at
once, and it was thought that 2,000 copies would hardly suffice for 1944.143
It seems, then, that there existed among the Nagas a delicate interdependence between sociology and cosmology. To say that religious change
was exclusively a function of social change would be as fatuous as to say the
opposite. Certainly a variety of factors combined to result in Naga mass
conversions. First, there was the association of Christianity with literacy;
second, its association with Western medicine. Third, there was the popular
perception of Christianity as a new technique, a new way of tapping a source
of power that could alleviate everyday problems. And fourth, the experience
of a wider social world resulting from imperial integration and modem
warfare was fundamental in breaking down the many Naga microcosms.
The foregoing might all be considered active factors in the conversion
process. In addition, though, there must be added one important passive
factor-itself insufficient to prompt a conversion movement, but a necessary
ingredient. This was the presentation of Christianity in terms of continuity,
rather than conflict, with indigenous religious systems. I have tried to show
that for all their fulminating against the social dimension of Naga religionprohibiting this, denying that-some missionaries were not at all reluctant to
rely very heavily on its cosmological dimension. Thus we see them as sort of
intellectual engineers, tinkering with Naga cosmologies, trying to fit their
own system into the Nagas, but doing so in a somewhat inconsistent way. In
the long run, it appears that those missionaries who found the most success
were those who allowed the Nagas to identify the Christian conception of
God within their own religious systems.
However, as long as the Nagas experience of reality remained confined to
their immediate locality, the lower tier of their cosmology that concerned
itself with that locality seems to have retained its explanatory force. The
upper tier of their cosmology, occupied by their supreme deity who underpinned the entire universe, was accordingly given only slight attention. This
was why the early missionary efforts among the Nagas met with relatively
little success: the missionaries had been elaborating the upper tier of the
Naga cosmology at a time when the Nagas, preoccupied with a concern with
more immediate spirits, were paying little attention to that tier. But as the
twentieth century progressed, world events like the integration of the Naga
Hills into British India and World War II confronted Nagas with a larger
142
W.J. Slim, Defeat into Victory, New York, David McKay Co.,1961, pp. 291-92. See also
Verrier Elwin, Nagaland, Shillong, P. Dutta, 1961, p. 71.
143
Tanquist Papers, 1943, p. 324.

44/1

reality than their lower tier of local spirits could be seen as controlling. Local
jungle spirits or crop deities now seemed too small in their range of effective
power to appear in control of the much larger macrocosm brought on by the
cumulative impact of imperial integration and modern warfare. As this
occurred, Nagas responded by paying greater attention to the supreme deity
who underpinned the entire universe and who appeared more clearly in
charge of things. It was at this point that the early missionaries much earlier
labours with respect to the clarification and redefinition of indigenous
notions of the supreme deity, as well as giving that notion a literary basis,
fruition.
The situation was not unlike that of the Apostle Paul preaching before the
elite of Athens in the first century A.D. Men of Athens, he declared,
came to

I have seen for myself how extremely scrupulous you are in all religious
matters, because I noticed, as I strolled around admiring your sacred
monuments, that you had an altar inscribed: To an Unknown God. Well,
the God whom I proclaim is in fact the one whom you already worship
without knowing its

Paul

capitulating to a Greek deity with these words, but only


expanding, clarifying, and enlarging upon an existing conception of that
deity. Yet the analogy with Paul in Athens breaks down on one critical
point: the Nagas were a preliterate people encountering a religious system
with powerful literary support. Inevitably, then, the old associations of
Tsungrem or Alhou, never having been committed to writing, would recede
was

not

from memory. And in time, those associations identified with Christian

scripture would gradually take on new meaning.

144

Acts 17 : 22-23.

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