Missionary
Ethnography and the Manufacturing of Desire in North-East India
Hamari Jamatia
Hamari
Jamatia is enrolled in the Ph.D programme of the English Department of the
University of Hyderabad. The topic of her thesis is Colonial Modernity in the
North-East in which an analysis of missionary narratives produced on the area
in the nineteenth and twentieth century and the way they shaped discourses on
history, population and gender is conducted. She completed her graduation and
post-graduation in English Literature from the University of Delhi.
Abstract
The paper focuses on the missionary
ethnography of North-East India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century and how it constructed native cultures as units that could be
dismantled and rebuilt through the cultivation of new desires. Missionary ethnography
hinged on the idea that a careful conditioning of the impulses surrounding
‘desire’ could ensure that education, cleanliness and scientific outlook appear
to be viable alternatives to the indigenous ‘heathen’ culture. Colonial forces,
in this case the missionaries, became conduit for the normalization of
Christian values that would ultimately manifest itself in the behavioral
pattern of the newly converted ‘civilized’ natives. To this end, the paper
highlights two related notions of uncivilized behavior that deeply concerned
the missionaries—violence and the occult among the natives to delve into how
ethnography changed their configuration among the Christianized population of
the North-East. The paper does a reading of a few select ethnographic narratives
by the American Baptist missionaries who were posted at various stations such
as Guwahati, Naga Hills and Garo Hills.
Keywords:
Missionary ethnography, myth of boundless desire, heathen, civilized behavior,
education, governance.
Introduction
The
memoir, A Corner in India (1907), by missionary wife Mary Mead Clark,
begins with a scene of struggle between a tranquil missionary domesticity and
its trespassing by native hill men. While living temporarily in Sibsagor,
Assam, she describes how a group of Ao Naga men had appeared at the mission
bungalow one day and had tried to forcefully sell her a goat that they had
brought along. Mrs. Clark recalls that despite her repeated vocal refusals, “these strange, uncivilised men down
from their mountain fastness, still persisted in dragging up the
steps of the veranda of our bungalow, a large, long and horned hill goat hoping
to receive from us double or quadruple its value” (Clark, 1). Even though this
was her first time meeting members of the Naga tribe, Mrs. Clark echoes the
colonial sentiments passed down from missionary to missionary reserved for
people from the hills—that the tribals did not possess the refinement of the
Westerners in their mannerisms as evidenced in their lack of respect for the
missionary’s privacy. Mrs. Clark elaborates, “Thus was I introduced to these
stalwart, robust warriors, dressed mostly in war medals, each man grasping his
spear shaft decorated with goat’s hair, dyed red and yellow, and also fringed
with the long black hair of a woman, telling the story of bloody deeds…dubbed
by the Assamese ‘head cutters’” (1). Mrs. Clark’s description of the Nagas sets
off the tone for the rest of her memoir where she studies the tribe in their
appearance, lifestyle, and beliefs as part of the missionary ethnographic
archive.
Soon
after being introduced to the Nagas at Sibsagor, Mr. and Mrs. Clark journey to
the Naga Hills and set up a mission village called Molung where they spend
their years building the foundation of a strong church. In the early years, it
was upon the Clarks to visit natives’ homes and persuade the people to accept
their doctrine. The role-reversal is, however, lost on Mrs. Clark who sets out
to work among the people with the purpose of changing them while strictly
trying to remain immune to any similar counter effect. Mary Mead Clark’s memoir
records her experiences among the Ao Nagas where the American Baptist Mission
became a success story of proselytization and modernity. In her work she describes
her first encounter with the Naga natives and narrates the latter’s subsequent
journey from a state of barbarity to a state of civility. In doing so, the
memoir becomes an ethnographic study of the Nagas by taking a close look at
their lives in their natural habitat. She describes their homes, agriculture,
travel, hunting expeditions, weddings and death rituals.
The
Clarks joined the rest of the mission workers who had arrived before them, in
targeting the indigenous life on the basis of its cruelty, superstitions,
filth, violence and polygamy. The missionaries inferred the inferior “nature”
of the indigenous population by observing the conduct of the individuals and
groups and by noting the various ways in which the tribal men and women failed
to live up to the standards of what they touted to be their own superior
missionary civilization. This comparison and the resultant evangelical
preaching led to a reform movement that brought about rapid drastic changes in
lifestyle of the natives. These changes manifested themselves in a rise in
literacy, a new taste for cleanliness, and an abstinence from heathen rituals.
The
paper argues that missionary ethnography, in this case, that of the American Baptist
Mission, coaxed and sustained the discourse that its object—the savage
natives—formed a society that could be dismantled and rebuilt using modern
management tools. This construction of culture around colonized subjects hinged
on the idea of human ‘desire’ as a central force that can be shaped and designed
in such a way that a community can be persuaded into reform. The essay
understands “desire” as a strong inclination towards certain ideology,
self-image and symbolism that ultimately dictates the conduct of the individual
and the community. This understanding emerges from the works of Michel Foucault
who defines desire as the primary mechanism that determines the action of the
individual/population. Foucault defines desire as “the pursuit of the
individual’s interest”, claiming that every individual “acts out of desire” (101).
He adds that this desire, which appears to very natural, is open to certain
mechanisms of power through which it can be moulded and shaped. In missionary
ethnographic realism, one can observe that a careful conditioning of the impulses
surrounding ‘desire’ ensured that education, cleanliness and scientific outlook
appeared to be viable alternatives to the indigenous culture portrayed as
illiterate, wild and barbaric. Colonial forces, in this case the missionaries,
became conduit for the normalization of these values that would ultimately
manifest itself in the behavioral pattern of the natives as good Christians.
To
achieve this objective, the missionaries targeted the symbolism of tribal
rituals, and redefined the concepts of masculinity, femininity, and
respectability among the new covert communities. Through the very act of
recording the culture of the tribes of North-East, the missionaries sustained a
discourse that validated their need to introduce the civilizing project by comparing
themselves to the ‘other’ or the tribals who they deemed inferior. In other
words, ethnography provided the platform where the missionaries could study
their own self-image against that of the tribes and encourage the othering of
the native cultures. In this essay, I highlight two related notions of
uncivilized behavior that deeply concerned the missionaries—violence and the
occult among the natives to delve into how ethnography changed their
configuration among the new population of the North-East.
The
paper focuses on selected works of American Baptist Mission workers stationed
in parts of North-East India. Apart from A
Corner in India, this paper shall study A
Garo Jungle Book (1919) by missionary William Carey and The Whole World Kin (1890), a collection
of papers and letters by Nathan Brown and wife Eliza Brown, the first
missionary couple to Assam. In addition, a few excerpts from Assam Mission, a collection of papers
presented by missionaries at the Baptist Mission Jubilee Conference in 1886 have
also been included.
The Missionary as Ethnographer
The
missionaries’ purpose of living in colonized lands was to convert the
population. But, conversion first required knowing the people one was tasked to
work among. This meant that missionaries had to routinely engage with and
observe the different peoples of the area. Thus, American missionaries working
in North-East India, much like the missionaries in the rest of the world
exhibited an ardent engagement with ethnographic study. They spent many years
and decades living in close proximity with the natives and undertook a close
study of their lives. They attended weddings, visited the sick, and witnessed
harvest and burial ceremonies as viewers. Annette Rosenstiel, in an essay, argues
that the missionaries were the first individuals to take a scientific approach
to ethnography and establish it as a discipline. By scientific approach, she
meant that the missionaries converted the study of cultures into a discipline
in which they judiciously kept a record of their observations and drew
inferences that would help them establish a church among the new people. The
missionaries also learnt the native language, published their findings and
indulged in ‘participant observation’ technique in which they partook of the
cultural activities under study. Rosentiel opines that some missionaries such
as William Carey1, also promoted non-ethnocentrism. She quotes Carey
as writing: “The missionaries must try to understand their (the natives’) moods
of thinking, their habits, their propensities, their antipathies, etc. This
knowledge may be easily obtained by reading some part of their works, and by
attentively observing their manners and customs” (108). According to Rosential,
Carey emphasized the importance of the missionary being “one of the companions
and equals of the people to whom he is sent” (108). In other words, the
missionary ought to display the spirit of egalitarianism that the missions were
originally established for.
Yet,
despite Rosentiel’s insistence that missionaries were instructed to treat the
natives as equals, there seems to be a marked difference between theory and
practice. Missionaries arriving to the North-East felt no affinity towards the
“animists” who they deemed to be peoples without history, culture and literacy.
Nathan Brown, the first American Baptist missionary to reach Assam describes
the Singpho tribe thus: “They seem to be perfect savages, entirely in the state
of nature, having no books, and are even without a written character to express
their own language” (118). He had earlier referred to savages of India as
similar to those of Burma, “There are the Singphos, the Miris, the Mishmis, the
Abors, the Nagas and other savage tribes, some of whom are in a state very
similar to the Karens, and have no written language or books. Here is the spot
for missionaries to go in, and sow the seed of life” (111). In his writings,
Nathan Brown established himself as an agent for the nineteenth century
civilizing mission that would go on to teach the natives how to lead a
civilized life. Other missionaries such as A. K. Gurney, who was in-charge of
Sibsagor field in the 70s and 80s maintained that there will always be a
hierarchy between them and the natives. He states:
Our modes of life, habits and
thoughts are different from those of the native Christian. There is a great
gulf between them and us. Our position is much above them. We cannot avoid
this. We cannot bring ourselves down to them or lift them up to us… The
missionary in education and knowledge is far above his native brother, and he
belongs to the conquering race, the English and Americans being all the same to
a native…. The missionary is so great in the eyes of his native brother, and
the latter feels so inferior in knowledge and wisdom that he does not feel like
taking the lead when the missionary is near but instinctively waits for him. (Assam Mission 119)
The
reflection by Mr. Gurney exposes some of the ambivalence associated with
missionaries as ethnographers. The writers recorded natives’ cultures from a
vantage point of view and could not help having a condescending attitude
towards it. They seem to solidify the understanding of ethnography as an
“invention” of cultures where one’s own identity dictated the interpretations of
alien societies. Roy Wagner in his analysis of culture writes that in some way,
an ethnographer “invents” the culture he works with as he “finds new
potentialities and possibilities for the living of life” (13-14). Here,
“invention” does not mean that the culture did not exist prior to the
ethnographer’s arrival, but that it is made “visible” by the ethnographer’s
focus on its “distinctiveness” that marks it as similar or different to his own
culture. Wagner declares that what the ethnographer sees as unique about
different culture stems from his “use of meanings known to him in constructing
an understandable representation of his subject” (16). In short, culture is
studied through culture. Wagner briefly adds that the difference between a
missionary ethnographer and a secular ethnographer falls in the realm of
“relative objectivity.” The anthropologist, inspite of his cultural background,
is supposed to “adjust” to foreign cultures and study it objectively whereas a missionary
is understood to use his bafflement to view anything native as “cussedness and
slovenliness, thus reinforcing their own elitist self-images” (16). In other
words, a missionary fails to look at native culture beyond the trappings of his
own culture.
It is no surprise then that
twentieth century post-colonial critics have been critical of ethnography and
have accused missionaries of acting as catalysts for colonization. According to
James Buzard, the notion of culture has been criticized for being an “essential
tool for making other,” in which a line is drawn between the civilized and the
uncivilized where the latter is seen as an appropriate subject for cultural
intervention (3). Culture divided the native population into “readily
governable thought packets” that came handy in their “control and regulation”
(4). The study of culture, therefore, became an imperial project to make the
otherwise “barbaric” people easier to govern.
Ethnography in the Nineteenth Century
In
addition to James Buzard, the paper derives much of its understanding of
ethnography from the works of Christopher Herbert who has analyzed the way
nineteenth century developed and treated the concept of culture. Herbert in Culture and Anomie (1991) writes that ethnography
as a disciple for the study of culture had just begun to become more distinct
as a field of enquiry in the 1860s. This was due to the colonization of Polynesian
countries which created a need for the study of the new populations that had
come under the Victorian sovereign’s control. British bureaucrats and
anthropologists began to take an interest in the lives and beliefs of the
natives’ they were administrating. By developing ethnography as a discipline, the
colonizers presented foreign cultures in a state of distress that required
reform. According to Herbert, the earliest ethnographers noticed that colonized
societies were “inferior” in stature as they did not have the refinement that
the British middle class exhibited. The Polynesian society was seen as a system
of “excess” in which basic human passions were left unregulated. Under the
colonial eyes, this perceived exhibition of unbridled senses was seen a symbol
of depravity. Herbert argues that the nascent discipline of ethnography hinged
on the consciousness that the way a society treated “desire” determined its position
in the evolutionary graph of humankind. This meant that colonized societies,
with their display of unbridled passions, were inferior to the British society
that had learnt to cultivate a restraint or a control on desire, thereby
marking itself as a superior civilization.
Herbert
goes on to elaborate that this importance of “desire” as a marker of inferior
and superior civilization had its inception during the evangelical revival movement
that had engulfed Britain between eighteenth and nineteenth century. Under the
leadership of Methodist John Wesley, the reform movement created and sustained
the belief that the nature of man when left unregulated can prove dangerous.
John Wesley asserted that all men were born carrying the symbols of the
original sin in which Adam and Eve fell from God’s grace as a result of their
lack of control over their desires. Thus, man in his natural state exhibited
“the image of the beast, in sensual appetites and desire” (31). Wesley’s
“mythology of sin” became the basis on which the fetishes of “self-control,
discipline, work, ‘purity,’ resignation, self-abnegation” (32) were built in
the Victorian culture under the insistence that desires had to be kept under
constant scrutiny. This understanding led to the escalation of desire into a
moral category in which man’s morality could be gauged through his ability to
suppress the beast within. Hence, with the spread of the imagery of man as
inherently fallen, the evangelist divided his nature as a “figurative imagery”
into the twin category of sin and salvation. What made the situation
incongruous was that while religion required docility, it also required an
“intense cultivation of desires” (35) in the form of passionate worship
rituals. Herbert writes that desire, both encouraged and forbidden, “must have
generated as a result no small quotient of tension and ambivalence” (35).
Nevertheless, by inculcating the suppression of desires as a necessary
precursor to any respectable civilization, the evangelical revival created a
discourse for evolutionary ethnography in which the Victorian society, with its
overarching focus on self-repression, became the epitome of refined culture.
Herbert, therefore, argues that society orchestrated the formation of culture
by controlling desire impulses among individuals and groups. He writes that
society does not serve as “an expression of immanent natural, divine, or
semiological order”, but functions as “an artificial restraint imposed by
necessity upon volatile, uncontrollably self-multiplying individual impulses
and desires which in a state of unimpaired freedom, could any such state exist,
would act without limit” (35). In other words, the formation of culture
simulates the construction of individuals and exhibits itself in the form of
their conduct by dictating and moulding their desire. Superior civilizations
claimed to function under “social restraint” in which individuals who exhibited
a heightened sense of self-control became elevated in comparison to the beasts
of the wild, which in ethnography referred to colonized societies with their
display of unbridled natural impulses.
It
was therefore discovered that human conduct, both Victorian and colonized, must
not be left to its natural devices but can be and should be shaped through
external social forces. Herbert writes, “…human desire by its very nature is
keyed to the constitutive principles of a society and acts not to disrupt but,
inescapably, to express and to reinforce them” (40). Controlling desire meant
conduct had to be governed at every stage. Yet, control did not have to be
oppressive or disruptive; rather it worked and still works under the guise of
individual freedom or liberty to conform to such laws. “In order for desire to
exist in any coherent, active, and potentially satisfiable form, it must embed
itself in a fully social matrix, which is to say, become directed towards
objects conventionally defined and symbolically coded as desirable by human
society” (50). According to Herbert, culture is not a form of control, but a
“system of desire” in which aspirations are already predetermined by the
society.
“The myth of boundless desire”
With
Victorian society touting itself as a superior civilization, the evangelical
belief in man’s fallibility or original sin found its new location among the
colonized societies. Herbert, who calls it the “myth of boundless desire,”
writes that colonization created a circumstance where the colonizers began to
derive their own cultural identity through the study and evaluation of foreign
societies. Learning about the cultures of different societies and portraying
them as a system of excess became a way of establishing themselves as just the
opposite. Missionaries in their travels to Polynesia, Africa and India found
ample evidence of heathen immorality shaped by the latter’s “uncontrolled
following of immediate desires” (Herbert 60). Ethnography as a discipline began
to create and sustain the Victorian image of the native as an “uneducated
savage” prone to “anarchy” and “selfish restlessness” (62). This gaze continued
to permeate across all aspects of native culture, from their traditional way of
dressing to the maintenance of their homes to their rituals of death.
In
their study of native culture, American missionaries too shared the concept of
the British civilizing mission where the native ‘culture’ was denigrated for
its exhibition of uncontrolled desires. The first generation of missionaries to
the North-East equated native life with lawlessness, laziness, unnecessary
violence and superstitions that marked them in need of a civilizing mission.
The nineteenth century protestant thought operated under the belief that
“civilizing and Christianizing” were the two sides of the same coin and that
one must invest in education and civilization before one can effectively
implement evangelism (Hutchison 65). William R. Hutchison writes that the
American Mission was inspired by the Puritan phrase “errand into the
wilderness” that suggested a “heightened activism—the actual transporting of a
message and witness to the unknown, possibly fearsome and uncivilized places”
(5). In other words, the American Mission, primarily under the American Board
of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), established in 1810, shared a
common ideal with its European counterparts and saw civilizing missions as a
pressing requirement in the face of imperialism in which the “white man’s
civilization would inevitably superseded that of the less developed cultures,”
(64) and even destroy it.
“Errand
into the wilderness” also consolidated the image of colonized societies as
savage and simplified the missionaries’ claim that in comparison, they
themselves were organized, hard-working, peaceful and reasonable. William
Carey, the writer of A Garo Jungle Book
highlighted that among the tribe that he worked with, “the fiercest passions
held sway” (6) that led them to commit terrible bloody deeds. They consistently
sustained the images of savagery, barbarity and a dependence on occult to drive
home the point that the natives had not yet found the right way to live. And yet, much like Herbert’s Victorian
conceptions of desire, the American missionaries too, espoused ambivalence
towards its treatment. Whereas they saw native desires as vulgar and
uncivilized, their own desire to work among the newly colonized areas was seen
as divine providence. Also, the missionaries claimed to know the difference
between two sets of desires—those that need controlling and those that need to
be fulfilled. This understanding is evoked in a letter that Mrs. Brown, the
first female American missionary in Assam, wrote to her sister in America,
where she says she is torn between two desires.
I sometimes have an unconquerable
desire to see my friends once more before I die. But the Lord has been gracious
to me; I should be very ungrateful to speak of trials and sufferings without at
the same time acknowledging the goodness of the kind Hand that has so often
given me support, and at times such sweet peace and consolation. As much as I
desire to see you once more, I have no settled wish to give up laboring in the
missionary field and return. (150)
Missionary
thought encouraged desire for proselytization but at the same time demanded
controlling other desires that would come in the way of fulfilling their
mission. The missionaries lived under trying circumstances without modern
amenities and support, and lost a number of lives to sudden diseases. Yet,
their desire to spread Christianity made them persevere in the plains and hills
of North-East, unwilling to surrender to the natives or the environment. The
morality of desire, therefore, depended on the subject of its impulse. In this
scheme of things, native desires were seen as dangerous and immoral as it
promoted savagery and superstition, whereas missionary desire was seen as
divine. Therefore, Mrs. Brown found great happiness in noticing that after
their arrival, there developed a curiosity for learning among the people:
“There is a rapidly increasing desire among all classes, to learn to read; and
we learn from many quarters, that a spirit of inquiry concerning this new
religion exists among the people” (Brown, 223). The native desire for knowledge
is encouraged as it is seen as a positive impulse that will lead people to read
the Bible and be persuaded to reform. This desire is also seen as a tool that
will counter their ignorance and teach them the Christian way of life.
North-East and Culture
The
use of “North-East” in this essay refers to the way the landmass with its seven
states – Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura,
Meghalaya – has come to be recognized as a post-colonial political terminology.
In the nineteenth-century, when maps were fluid, much of the area we
understand as “North-East” was clubbed with the Assam province. Today, when the
state boundaries have been drawn and earmarked, my primary texts are located in
the three states where American Baptist missionary activities were rapidly
established—Assam, Nagaland and Meghalaya. The term “North-East” does not do
justice to the heterogeneity of the land and its peoples. There are multiple
problems in clubbing seven unique states together as if they are mirror-copies
of one another. Yet, I seek to use the nomenclature “North-East” as a matter of
convenience as well as part-acceptance of the way the region has come to be
identified since the advent of colonial modernity.
American
missionary writings seldom recognized the native lifestyle and ideology as
constituting a well-defined culture, choosing instead to define them as
“habits” and “customs” of the hill tribes. The missionaries repeatedly termed
the natives ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ to highlight the fact that these people lived
in a state of nature subsisting on primitive tools and practices. Indeed,
several times in their works, the Garos and Nagas are likened to monkeys due to
their flair for living in the ‘jungle lair,’ climbing trees and disappearing
among the foliage at will.2 The corresponding ethnography resorted
to describing the natives under such titles as “The savage at home” (Clark 40),
“The savage in costume and at work,” (49) “Savage worship and strange legends,”
(57) thereby stripping them of any respectable civilization. The disdain for
local cultures exposed the missionaries’ refusal to recognize the existence of
multiple cultures around the world. In this regard, James Buzard in his
analysis of nineteenth century ethnography has highlighted the lacuna of the
earliest ethnographers in identifying local cultures as “the wholeness of a
particular people’s way of life” (5). Instead, the discipline fixated itself
with a single yardstick “for judging the development of human faculties” (5)
based on the European model of civilization. Writing in the context of
Victorian ethnography, Buzard notes that anthropology favoured a narrative in
which “the evolution of human social forms and technologies, was committed to
dealing with levels of human Culture— frequently written with a capital C—from
primitive to advanced, and not with separate, relatively autonomous ‘cultures,’
differently evolved under different environmental conditions” (6). In other
words, it was believed that there was only one culture—exemplified by the
British society—and different societies marked a different stage of
civilization, with primitive populations at the bottom of the pyramid and the
British at the helm.
Through
frequent labeling of colonized societies as “savage” and “wild,” the American
missionaries, too, subscribed to the concept of evolutionary anthropology in
which they believed in the hierarchies of civilization. The study of local
cultures served to strengthen the conviction that the natives required a
guiding hand to pull them out of centuries of darkness. The missionaries sought
to find inspiration in some of their successful experiences among the American
aboriginals where Christianity had made a marked difference. They found
similarities between the hill tribes of North-East India and the North American
Indians in their fetish surrounding the human skull and the human scalp
respectively. They believed that just as Christianity had succeeded in reforming
some sections of American Indians, it would achieve an identical accomplishment
among the people of North-East. In addition, it strengthened the conviction
that certain management tools at the dispensation of missionaries were capable
of coaxing heathens into embracing new desires. The flexibility of desire,
therefore, became the grounds on which the battle of Christ and culture was
fought.
Violence and the Occult Among the Natives
In
order for the missionaries to modify the state of the natives, they needed to
first break it down into multiple units. Among the tribes of North-East India,
this translated into an intense engagement with two concepts that came under
constant attack as motifs of their apparent savagery—that of the tribes’
violent temperament and that of the race’s dependence on the occult. As soon as they arrived to the
North-East, the missionaries noted that the Nagas and the Garos exhibited a
tendency to resort to violence in dealing with everyday situations, unlike those
of the peaceful population of the contiguous Bengal. Their narratives therefore
portrayed the two “savage tribes” as operating within a cycle of lawlessness
and barbarism in which they mostly stayed hidden in the inaccessible hilly
ranges only to appear in the plains to raid the villages or to trade in the
markets at the foothills. During the raids, the raiding team would attack a
hamlet and carry back “cattle, goats and dogs and not infrequently a much
prized human head,” (Clark, 116) writes Mrs. Clark. The American mission harked
on to this image of the natives as head-hunters in most of their ethnographic
writings. They detailed the manner in which this ritual was part of the native
identity and how the hill villages had homes that displayed skulls as decorative
items. To the missionaries, head-hunting became a demonstration of the
backwardness of hill people and a threat to the other, more civilized
communities of British India. Other exemplars of the violent disposition of the
hill tribes included the penchant for animal sacrifices at every chance, and
bloody feuds among personal enemies that ended in murderous rages.
As
for the importance of occult in their lives, William Carey in a chapter titled
“The Wild Men at Home,” writes that superstitions guided the behavior of the
locals at each step:
No journey can be taken unless the
fates are propitious, no war engaged in without a sacrifice, no land cleared
for cultivation without impaling a monkey or a goat, no marriage solemnized, or
birth celebrated, or sickness tended, no experience of the coming of death to
take away its victim, without the shedding of blood. (23)
Both
acts of head-hunting and the occult happened amidst uncontrolled drinking
habits. Mrs. Clark and William Carey were intensely critical of the use of
intoxicants among the Nagas and Garos in which every festival and every feast
mandatorily included animal sacrifice and a free-flow of alcohol. Carey
recalls, “When in liquor the Garos are merry to the highest pitch; men, women,
and children dancing until they can scarcely stand. A birth, a marriage, a
death, the opening of a market, the sitting of a council, the trial of a
delinquent, almost any and every event serves as an occasion for feasting and
an excuse for drink” (9). For missionaries and British bureaucrats, this
unrestraint merriment and violence pushed the boundaries of native conduct
towards immorality with one missionary in Assam
Mission declaring, “The Garos are ruined by sin” (67). Here, one can see
the “invention” of culture playing out between the missionary-as-ethnographer
and his/her interpretation of native lifestyle. Through his/her writing, the
ethnographer makes “visible” certain traits of the Nagas and Garos that to him/her
appear distinctive due to its shock value. By contrast, the missionary sees his/her
own culture as exemplar of peace and love and believes that by displaying patience
and suffering, he would inspire the locals into imitating the same.
In
Assam Mission, for instance, Mr.
Mason while presenting his paper titled “Methods of Mission Work” urges other
missionaries to conduct themselves in “a Christ-like love” (Assam Mission 102) so that the converts
learn from their teachers how to augment their spiritual life. Some pages
later, Mr. W. E. Witter calls on the missionaries to be “living examples of the
Word….to exemplify God’s love for the Assamese, Garos, and Nagas by our
separateness from sin and our patience with ‘the unthankful and the evil’” (Assam Mission 153). The American
missionaries identified native life as synonymous with sin and evil with no
room for subtleties. Such a stance highlighted their own role as accomplices in
establishing a British government in the North-East. Their ethnography
reinforced and supported the official narrative that natives were “incorrigible
savages,” making it convenient for the British to annex all hill territories to
maintain peace and order.
The
bureaucrats and the missionaries were in consonance that long-lasting peace
would only come with cultural reformation, that is, if the wild desires of the
savages are curbed through a culture of restraint. To this end, the government sought
the help of missionaries in silencing dissent. E. G. Philips notes, “Government
has not been slow to see, as the Chief Commissioner put it in his Resolution on
the Educational Report for Assam of
1881-82, that ‘it is difficult to convince a Garo or a Khasia…of the advantage
of learning. The only lever that has been found effective is that of religion’”
(Assam Mission 67-68). Hence, the
government handed over the management of schools entirely to the missionaries
in the hopes that they would be able to tame the savages. The Christian
religion was seen as a tool that would modify the conduct of its converts by
dismantling its dependence on violence and occult.
Towards a New Symbolic Order
Clifford
Geertz writes that culture functions within the gambit of semiotics where
conduct is dictated by the meaning it produces. He argues that culture is not
“an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of
meaning” (5). To produce this meaning requires that members of a community be
aware of the relationship between action and its many interpretations. Geertz
explains his idea by citing the difference between a “wink” and a “twitch,”
both of which are “identical movements” but which have vastly different
connotations. A “wink” as a conduct is an act of communication “in a quite
precise and special way,” in which there is a signifier, a sign and a recipient
who is part of “an already understood code.” A twitch, on the other hand has no
secondary function.
Contracting your eyelids on purpose
when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial
signal is winking. That’s all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of
culture, and voila!—a gesture. (6)
Human
behavior is therefore a “symbolic action” which is shared by members of his
community so that communication can take place, and while “winking” is one of
the simpler examples of it, any culture is a cauldron of “texts” that
constitute “webs of significance.” Thus Geertz sums up culture as “a
historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of
inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people
communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes
towards life” (89). Human actions, therefore, create meanings that can be
understood by people sharing the same culture.
Keeping
this in mind one can witness how an action creates two different
interpretations for two sets of cultures. Head-hunting as an act is perceived
as barbaric and wild by the missionaries, but among the tribal communities
themselves, it served as a sign of masculinity. Mrs. Clark writes that as much
as the raids by Nagas contributed as an additional source of income, the act of
killing and taking the heads of the fallen enemies was linked with masculine
pride and played a catalyst in men-women relationships. “Men were dubbed women
or cows until they had contributed to the village skull-house. Young maidens
instigated their betrothed to this bloody work, and it was woman’s voice that
trilled the cry of victory when these prizes reeking in blood were brought into
the village,” (47) Mrs. Clark writes. A Naga man’s worth and a Naga village’s
honor were tied to the number of skulls that the community had managed to
extract from other settlements.
Similarly,
among the Garos, head-hunting served to create bonhomie among its different
members as a form of group activity. In A
Garo Jungle Book Carey notes that that the Garos “won an evil reputation of
murderous raids” and routinely massacred the landholders of the plains for
material gains. On their return journey from a triumphant plunder, the
tribesmen would collect the “reeking heads; and filling these with wine and
food, would eat, drink, and dance, chanting songs of triumph” (Carey 11).
Head-hunting, as a cultural behavior, was symbolic of community prowess and
therefore contributed to the social status of these tribes as an inseparable
part of their identity. Nonetheless, the British government was critical of
this activity and tried to ban it as early as 1822. However, the practice
continued undeterred for many decades till missionary presence in the hills put
a stop to it.
For
missionaries to succeed in conduct management, they first had to break the
symbolic order associated with certain sinful desires that physically
manifested itself in the conduct. A telling instance of this is narrated in A Corner in India where we witness a
gradual shift in the factors that determined the making of a desirable youth.
It started with a native Assamese preacher—Zilli—guiding the young men of
Molung into embracing the Gospel. At first, only one youth was attracted to the
new religion. But, that single young man was soon able to influence a friend
and bring him to Christ. The following excerpt from a letter by Mrs. Clark
records how Christianity sowed its seeds in the new village:
A religious and social reform has
been quietly going on at Molung, beginning with a young man, who, strengthened
by the Holy Spirit and helped by Assamese teacher Zilli, laid hold of one of
his companions, and by persistent, prayerful effort brought him to Christ. Here
were now two promising young men, the pick of the village, educated in the
school, one, the son of our most influential village official, and the hearts
of both filled with the love of Jesus, and set for the defense of his kingdom
and social purity…. One after another of the young people were pressed into the
ranks, and the White Ribbon Society, without the name, or buttonholes in which
to wear the badge, grew in numbers and influence and power. (138)
Some
pages later, Mrs. Clark writes that these boys were members of the Training
School run by missionaries where they prepared “young men for pastors,
evangelists and day school teachers” Meanwhile, young women were trained “to be
suitable wives for such men” (148).
The
above account of missionary activity among the Naga youth highlights the fact
that the manly pride associated with head-hunting was slowly replaced by a
pride in being Christian where embracing the new religion became synonymous
with literacy, rationality, and modernity. According to Mrs. Clark, the heathen
young men would spend their evenings “singing objectionable songs, telling
doubtful stories, and engaging in lewd conversation,” whereas the educated
young men who had built a separate dormitory could be heard praying and singing
songs of praise. In the latter accommodation “purity and holiness” reigned,
remarks Mrs. Clark, thus dividing actions into the categories of moral and
immoral in which the heathen populace, with its inability to control its
vulgarity became subordinate to the new Christian population that had begun to
curb their savage instincts.
Education and the Shifting of Desire
What
we witness here is the struggle that took place in the domain of desire and the
creation of its hierarchies. When the missionaries had first arrived, the
natives’ “boundless” desire was seen as the root cause of their destitution. Education
was seen as an effective tool to curb the wild desires and channel them towards
more productive ones. Arkotong Longkumer in his analysis of educational
policies among the Nagas argues that the mission immediately realized that if
evangelism was to succeed, it had to first cultivate the minds of the people.
Thus, missionary Nathan Brown prepared the Report
of the Committee on Schools in 1853 to frame an education policy in which
it suggested that schools be established for the “‘training of future pastors
and teachers’ and that only Christians should be employed as teachers with
Christian books and daily observance of religious services” (Longkumer 3).
Longkumer
adds that the ABFMS was channeled by the belief that “prominence of the mind
and the cultivation of reason” must precede any attempt at conversion. The human
mind “had to be shaped through an emphasis on education, which would
‘eventually lead to the vindication of Christian truth’” (3). Thus, American
missionaries wasted no time in establishing schools and enrolling native boys
and girls. Soon enough, the results began to show in the shape of young men and
women who had begun to reflect upon the two cultures under whose shadow they had
grown up—their traditional heathen culture and the western culture—and who now
realized that they were more compatible with the new Christian teachings. Hence,
some of the first male pupils of missionary schools were also its first
converts.
In
this context, missionary ethnography focused on narrating the stories of a few
converts who not only validated the mission’s self-image as an empowering
enterprise but they also became the taskforce for the spread of Christianity in
the interiors where the handful of white missionaries could not reach. In his
work, Carey narrates the life stories of two Garo converts—Ramkhe and Omed—who
journey from heathenism to becoming spiritual leaders and who become the
symbols of new Christian conduct in which they are able to differentiate
between desires that are forbidden and those that are encouraged. These two
names appear frequently in missionary history because of their enormous
contribution to the spread of Christianity. In order to add authenticity to the
narrative, Carey translated extracts from Ramkhe’s manuscript autobiography,
written in Bengali in 1886, to piece together the life and experiences of the
convert who questioned his heathen faith in the wake of socio-cultural changes
around him.
Carey
notes that both Omed and Ramkhe studied at Government secular school in
Goalpara, established in 1847, that “provided them with the equipment and
opportunity for discovering the truth. It opened their eyes and awakened
inquiry in their minds, and was part of the means by which they were taught of
God” (52). He further narrates that as boys of the jungle, Omed and Ramkhe
witnessed the preparation of more than one raid in which the elders of their
village returned home carrying “dripping load of heads” (53). It filled Ramkhe
with a particular fear of demons. After being schooled, however, a deeply
meditative Ramkhe began to question his long-held beliefs and fears and found
solace in Christianity. In his discussion with Omed they agreed that
Christianity “is good in every respect” (69).
After
leaving their schools and later on their jobs as sepoys, Ramkhe and Omed
preached among their people of Garo Hills. They eventually set up two Christian
villages in which all motifs of heathenism and the occult were banned. Omed’s
hut was built on the foothills where he could preach to the groups of people
headed to the market. Carey notes that the hut was a “house of prayer…There are
no bamboos stuck around it sprinkled with blood. No priest of the demons goes
there to practice his magic spells. No drink is brewed. But there is much
reading of a sacred book that sounds good to hear, and much reverent yet
familiar speech with the Good Spirit, such as falls, even upon a wild man’s
heart, like a whisper of peace” (Carey 88). Furthermore, Omed grew a community
of followers who would venture into the Rongjuli market with him to preach the
shoppers about Christianity.
Omed’s
story confirms the missionary belief that education could play an instrumental
role in countering savagery; that it could help a former heathen distinguish
between moral and immoral desires. Much like how the white missionaries desired
Christianity among the natives despite the dangers that surrounded them, the
newly educated converts, too, channeled their energy towards the same object in
the face of fierce resistance from members of their tribe. Indeed, things
escalated to the extent that Omed and his friends were physically assaulted
while they were preaching at a local marketplace. On hearing about the attack,
the British Deputy Commissioner, Captain Morton, visited the market and warned
all present that anyone who tries to harm the Christians would be punished.
This saved the Christians from further harassment. Education and
Christianization became a joint project shared by the British officials and the
American mission. The mission converted the hill people to Christianity, making
them easier to govern, and the British provided them protection from
prosecution, creating a group of workers who would either become Christian
teachers or take up a government job.
According
to Longkumer, education also sowed the seeds for nationalism among the
different tribes of the North-East by giving them a common Roman script. The
missionaries rapidly learnt the local languages, prepared them in Roman script
and went about translating the Bible. At the same time, it taught English at
its schools so that the students could access the translations in their own
vernacular. Inspite of being a multi-lingual people, the Roman script was
common to all, as was English education. Longkumer writes, “Christian
conversion, education, and nationalism – was a vital centripetal force that
fostered an ‘imagined community’ that brought together disparate tribes under
two institutional centres: the school and the church” (9). He argues that
sharing a common script consolidated the different tribes and made way for the
creation of Naga identity that would later on culminate in a Naga nationalist
movement.
The
“myth of boundless desire” was an ethnographic creation that was used to
classify the world population into civilized and uncivilized. This myth rested
upon the belief that civilized populations of Europe and America had developed
self-control over their basic, animalistic, dangerous impulses whereas
uncivilized people of the colonies had not, thereby making the latter “wild”
and “savage”. The American civilizing mission declared itself an enterprise of
“love and peace” and attempted to develop self-control among the peoples of
North-East so they would rein in their impulses for violence and the occult. At
the same time, the mission promoted new desires that it believed were important
to the spread, acceptance and practice of Christianity—a desire for learning, a
desire for peaceful coexistence, a desire for a new religion, and a desire for
a shared language. In other words, the American Baptist Mission did not
annihilate “desire” but changed its course among the peoples of North-East.
This understanding around the concept of desire prompted and sustained the
evangelical discourse and helped give birth to a new population that was
Christian in its beliefs and conduct.
The
converts had begun to dress modestly, had surrendered many of their traditional
rituals, and were rapidly becoming a literate community. The changes were
brought about by missionary ethnography’s discursive construction of a native
population that unfolded on two levels. At one level, it constructed the
‘heathen people’ who the missions sought to convert into Christianity. It paid
careful attention to record and disseminate detailed reports on social and
religious practices, which helped constitute the natives as heathen. On the
other level, it also constructed the ‘civilized people’ who were produced
through the evangelical labor of the missionaries.
Endnotes
1
William Carey (1761-1864) was an English
Baptist Minister who established the Serampore College and the Serampore
University in Bengal. He inspired the founding of the Baptist Missionary
Society in London. The American Mission held him in high regard and dedicated
the establishment of their organization to him. In Sophie Bronson’s A Century of Baptist Foreign Mission,
she describes Carey’s work as the reason why missionary societies sprang up in
New England, America
2 In A Corner in India, Mrs. Clark worries that Naga school-children are
prone to disappearing among the trees or the roof of some house at school time
(8). Alternately, Carey in A Garo Jungle
Book writes that during their resistance against the British, the Garos
took to the trees like “like monkeys, still and invisible among the leaves,”
(49).
Works
Cited
Assam Mission:
American Baptist Missionary Union Report.
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Annette, Rosenstiel, “Anthropology and the
Missionary”, The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland,
Vol. 89, No. 1
(Jan. - Jun., 1959), pp. 107-115
Brown, E. W. The Whole World Kin: A Pioneer
Experience among Remote Tribes and
Other Labors of Nathan Brown.
Hubbard Brothers, 1890.
Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The
Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century
British Novels.
Princeton UP, 2005.
Carey, William. A Garo Jungle Book; or, The
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1919.
Clark, Mary Mead. A Corner in India.American
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Education, and Print amongst the
Nagas in Northeast India.” Contemporary South
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