Christianity and Empire in South Manipur Hills

By Samuel G Ngaihte and Reuben Paulianding

This book contextually examines the advent of Christianity in South Manipur Hills, North-East India, within the larger framework of British colonial intrusions upon the Zo world. It explores the internal rationale that informs the reception, appropriation, and institutionalisation of the Christian narrative through a hermeneutical reading of the Senvon-encounter between the missionaries and the Zo communities as a site of dialogic meeting and negotiation. The authors postulate the importance of the agency of host communities as a site of contextual enquiry which has methodological and substantive insights, both for the theological discourse on contextualisation, and the self-understanding of the Zo peoples.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnum Books International
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914454196

Samuel G Ngaihte

Samuel G Ngaihte is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests include Continental and Indian philosophy, Philosophical Anthropology and dialogic methodology. He currently teaches Philosophy at Manipur University, Canchipur and pursues research work in the North-East of India.

Book preview

Introduction: Pathways for the Journey

The arrival of Watkin Roberts and his proclamation of the Christian gospel to the Chief and the inhabitants of the village of Senvon on 7th May 1910 has been accepted and celebrated as the foundational event that launched the establishment and growth of the numerous churches that we find today in South Manipur Hills, North-East India. The continual recognition and observance of this date as ‘Missionary Day’ and the collective celebration of its centenary year (in 2010) by all the respective clan and ethnic-based local churches across these hills is a testament to its significance for the Zo people-groups inhabiting the region. Today, in both the popular imagination and the Churches’ self-understanding, the Senvon-encounter is presented as the historic moment that enabled a transformative paradigmatic shift amongst the Zos – from a primordial world of ‘darkness’ and ‘slavery’ to one of ‘light’, liberation and purpose. This ahistorical reading and remembering of the event through a monologic religious lens, which is undergirded by a conversion narrative, continues to monopolise the discourse around Senvon and the advent of Christianity in South Manipur Hills. This continued reiteration of the event through a singular perspective, while popular, has resulted in the side-lining, not only of the broader political context of colonialism within which the encounter took place, but more importantly, the agential role of the Zos in this historical process. In the absence of this political backdrop of Empire that conjoins the ‘religious’ and the ‘political’, the nature of Christianity and the church as it proliferated amongst the Zos continues to remain both ill-represented and largely misunderstood. The dialogic manner in which the Senvon-encounter has served as a pathway to provide the Zos with the technologies necessary to preserve and renegotiate their selfhood and lived-world vis-à-vis the onslaught of Empire thus remains unexplored.

This book seeks to offer a hermeneutical reading of the event, primarily in light of the growing discourse on the theme of ‘contextualisation’ within theological scholarships and discussions. The interpretative tools and analysis that are brought to bear in this reading will primarily be shaped by the parameters of the discourse on contextualisation. It will seek to explore substantive and methodological insights that are relevant, first, to the discourse on the theme of contextualisation and, second, to the continued re-exploration and re-construction of the Zo world (Zo Khawvel). By locating the Senvon-encounter and its reverberations within the broader framework of the tension between the intrusion and assertion of the British Empire upon the Zo world on the one hand, and the Zos’ attempt to reclaim their selfhood and traditionary understandings of autonomous living on the other, this book seeks to present the advent of Christianity as a site of dialogic meeting that engendered the appropriation of the technologies of the ‘other’ by the Zos in their quest to realise their ever-present telos of self-determined living, i.e. living on one’s own terms. The excavation and re-interpretation of the complex journey of encounter and engagement that ultimately culminated in the establishment of the local presbytery (church) under the shadow of the prevailing political scenario will allow us to disclose the agency of who are generally known as the ‘host’ communities, i.e. the receivers of the Christian gospel. It is this agency viz. the voice of the dialogue-partner, which has been missing in the discussions and debates concerning the issue of contextualisation more generally, and the historical formation of Zo churches more specifically.

To attempt to articulate contextually then, is to explicate the underlying presuppositions of this dialogical encounter by taking into account not only the perspectives of the mission societies or missionaries but, more importantly, the rationality of the receiving community. It is precisely this rationality that is fore-fronted as the site of enquiry into the nature of contextualisation in this book. The proclamation of the Christian gospel by the mission societies and missionaries was not an imposition upon ‘simple savages’, but it was a transformative-message which the Zos received and appropriated intentionally, primarily as a way of negotiating the changing socio-political turmoil within which their village-worlds were located. Therefore, the Senvon-encounter is not only a story of the inroads of Christianity in the hills of South Manipur, but it constitutes a significant episode of the larger narrative of the Zos’ continual struggle to reclaim and renegotiate their selfhood and lived-world in light of their cherished practice and vision of self-determined living. The explication of the encounter through the political context of this struggle and agency will in turn allow us to excavate the traditionary understanding and existence and understanding of a Zo peoples, the nature of disruption introduced into their world, and the re-unification and self-determination aspirations that informed their embodied dialogic perspective.

The Nomenclature ‘Zo’: A Preliminary Remark

The term ‘Zo’ is used, following Zo historians and scholars such as Vumson and Bianca Son, to refer to the various people-groups who are found widespread on each side of the international boundaries between North-Western Myanmar on the east, South-Eastern part of North-East India and South-Eastern Bangladesh on the west. They inhabit the Northern Arakan Hills or present-day Chin Hills State and Rakhine (Arakan) State in Myanmar, Chittagong Hills Tracts and Sylhet District in Bangladesh, Cachar Hills of Lower Assam, Mizoram State (formerly Lushai Hills), pockets of areas in Tripura and Meghalaya, and the hill areas of Manipur State in India. These areas, which were taken to cover the extent of land lying between 18°N and 25°30’N latitudes and 90°30’E and 95°E longitudes was often simply described as ‘Chin-Lushai country’, owing to the cultural and linguistic affinities of the inhabitants and their geographical contiguity.¹ The intrusion of the British Empire into these areas and the epistemic and military restructuring that followed due to their presence have resulted in the construction of colonial nomenclatures such as ‘Chin’, ‘Lushai’, ‘Kuki’, or even ‘Chin-Lushai’, ‘Chin-Kuki’ ² and ‘Lushai-Kuki clans’, ³ each of which were introduced in different administrative areas. Interestingly, these colonial nomenclatures continue to be adopted by the Zos in their post-colonial engagement with their respective states, and have occasionally given rise to critical insider discussions over the question of the relevance and viability of the self-ascribed category ‘Zo’ in the contemporary political climate.

At the outset, it must be noted that, while insider debates around nomenclatures abound in contemporary discourse, the debate has always been specifically centred around the more contemporary issue of a ‘politics of survival’.⁴ Given that the Zo territories had already been firmly divided between different countries (and different states within each country) by the twentieth century when emerging Zo scholars began their enquiries particularly concerning issues of ‘identity’, ‘territoriality’ and modern state relations etc., the debate has predominantly revolved around the practicality of using ‘Zo’ as an official category to identify themselves in their respective modern political set-ups. With each Zo group demanding different forms of autonomy to enable them to protect their traditionary beliefs and practices in their respective displaced locations, the rationale was that a more state-recognised category or nomenclature would lend a more cohesive argument and negotiating power in their respective ‘political dialogues’. Colonial nomenclatures, such as ‘Chin’ or ‘Kuki’ for example, whose occurrence in official (state) archives and records can be seen to far outweigh the more elusive Zo, is taken to be a more practical category for identifying themselves and their struggles. Therefore, the issue around terminologies has fundamentally always been about practical-politics (including electoral-politics) rather than authentic self-understandings.

The insider debates concerning nomenclature has never been about the validity of the self-understood and accepted category Zo as a collective identity that inescapably tie (bound) all of the varied Lushai[Mizo]-Hmar-Kuki-Chin-Zomi clans together by blood, language, beliefs and praxis. Behind the adoption of the category ‘Zo’ is not only the presupposition of an affinity and shared heritage amongst the groups to which the term is applied, ⁵ but also the acknowledgment of a shared territory (‘country’) over which they presided before the fragmentation imposed by the colonial borders. The generic term ‘Zo’ is thus largely and relatively uncontroversial for the Zos themselves,⁶ even if they understood the origin and meaning of the term ‘Zo’ as either a geographical reference or as the name of a common progenitor, or both.⁷ It continues to be acknowledged and accepted by all as their authentic self-description, albeit as an overarching meta-nomenclature that encompasses all the Zo clans. This self-description by the Zos is an actuality that most colonial administrators and ethnographers have taken note of, as evident in their discussion of what they often spell or pronounce as ‘Jo’, ‘Yo’, ‘Sho’, or ‘Dzo’.⁸ Therefore, the enquiry concerning the term ‘Zo’ and the question about what it encompasses or signifies must be pursued not in the current contentions over terminologies, but in the unwritten (and un-officialised) form of traditionary practices and beliefs that bind the Zos together culturally and spiritually, and which they continue to seek to protect, preserve and affirm in each of their respective contemporary settings. The following chapters present the complex world of the Zos and explicates the unique nature of ‘oneness’ and ‘affinity’ that these diverse clan groups share.

Frontier Missions and South Manipur Hills

To initiate a discussion on a mission-history of the Zos by taking the example of a relatively unknown and unrecognised event that happened in a corner of the hills of South Manipur as late as 1910 may come across as an uncharacteristic place to begin. This is because not only have areas such as the Lushai Hills and Chin Hills seen the advent of missionaries and mission work as far back as 1894 and 1899 respectively (with the Welsh Presbyterian missionaries working in the Lushai Hills and the American Baptist missionaries working in the Chin Hills)⁹ but, furthermore, these territories are comparatively larger and more densely populated by the Zo people-groups themselves. The hill areas of South Manipur, when placed in the context of the entire Zo inhabited areas, are historically seen only as an extension of the northern Chin Hills. This was largely due to (a) the absence of a clear boundary between the Kingdom of Manipur and the Chin Hills; (b) the presence of Zo inhabitation and cultivation areas up to the valley of Manipur; and (c) the claim of the Kamhau-Sukte chiefs, who were then based in Mualbem and Tedim (in present-day Chin State), to suzerainty over this entire area well into the late nineteenth century.¹⁰

Geographically, while these hill areas now fall under the administrative jurisdiction of the state of Manipur, these relatively isolated and un-administered frontiers have always shared a kinship, cultural and political ties-of-blood with the Lushai Hills, Chin Hills and Chittagong Hill Tracts. ¹¹ This unusual arrangement, imagined by the colonial cartography and pen since 1894 and forged by their policies since 1917, have resulted in making the Zos of these hills simultaneously ‘relocated’ and reduced to a minority in a new state. The negotiation of this imposed disadvantage continues to remain a central theme in their engagement and encounter with the other. While the struggle for re-unification of all the Zo inhabited areas has been an ever-present theme ever since the cartographic ethnification of their areas under different administrative rule, the incorporation of the majority of Chin Hills within the Union of Burma through the signing of the Panglong Agreement (1947) between the Zos and the then Burmese leaders, and the subsequent transformation of Lushai Hills into the state of Mizoram through a signing of the Mizo Accord (1986) between the Mizo National Front and Union of India,¹² has resulted in the relinquishing of these vast hill areas to become frontiers to the Zo country itself.

The reduction of the erstwhile northern Chin Hills into a distinct geography that is at once distanced [politically] from both Chin Hills and Lushai Hills to become an un-administered ‘no man’s land’¹³ meant that they had the arduous responsibility of championing the Zo cause and continually re-igniting it. This has helped them become not only the epicentre of the Zo quest for ‘re-unification’, but has more importantly engendered the flourishing of a lived-world that is insistent in its promotion of a diverse dialectal self-understanding of each respective clan, as is the Zo way. This has resulted in the preservation and promotion of oneness not as uniformity but as a celebration of respectful difference. It is the shouldering of this responsibility for envisioning a re-unification and practicing a oneness while preserving their dialectal differences, that places these hills as an important site for understanding the nature of Zo agency and the richness of their traditionary multi-cultured polyglossic world. It is this understanding that this book will excavate, specifically by drawing insights from their encounter with the Christian missions and their transformative work.

The Making of Manipur State: A Cartographic Background

Discussions concerning the idea of Manipur State as a uniformed jurisdiction or territory with ‘clear boundaries’¹⁴ is complicated because of the contentious ways in which each of the East, West, North and South boundaries of the Kingdom of Manipur were settled by the British Empire. Geographically, Manipur is the site where important hill ranges, namely the Naga Hills, the Lushai Hills, the Chin Hills and the North Cachar Hills all converge together, forming an encirclement around the Manipur valley. Different ethnic communities from the Zo (Kuki, Zomi and Hmar) and Naga communities inhabit each of these hill ranges, with the valley area constituting the Kingdom of Manipur inhabited by the various Meitei clans, the majority of whom are now recognised as Vaishnavite Hindus. The Kingdom of Manipur was annexed immediately after the subduing of the Palace Uprising¹⁵ in 1891 and became one of the princely states of British India thereafter. The British Empires’ relation with the Kingdom was maintained through a ‘cordial relationship’ managed through the Political Agent, who was a British Officer stationed in the courts of the Rajas’ since 1935.¹⁶ The wars between British India and Burma, particularly in relation to the Kingdom of Manipur, has meant that issues relating to the drawing of boundaries were usually negotiated between these two external powers, and occasionally with the knowledge (but not always the say or contribution) of the successive Raja(s) of the Kingdom. The British, as the victor in the Anglo-Burmese Wars, would have the final say in all matters, including issues that concern the making and settlement of porous boundaries. The ruling empires never sought to consult any of the inhabitants of these hill areas, or enquire about their land-ownership patterns or their understanding of territories and boundaries.¹⁷ The division and demarcation of areas and the settling of boundaries were done by the British mainly for ‘administrative convenience’ rather than due considerations of the ethnic composition of each area.

Between the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826 and the setting up of the Chin-Manipur Boundary Commission in 1893, the cartographic demarcation of these territories were settled in a series of unrelated stages. In a treaty signed between the British and Burma (Myanmar) in 1833, the western boundary line of Manipur was settled by taking the Jiri River and the western bend of the Barak River as its boundary. The eastern boundary line was finalised in a subsequent treaty in 1834, under which the Kabaw valley was ceded to Burma. This ‘gifting’ of the Kabaw valley by the British to Burma was seen as an act of betrayal by the Kingdom of Manipur and its people, and subsequently impacted, in different degrees, the way the rest of the boundary issues were settled. Dr R. Brown, the Political Agent of Manipur between 1867-75, and Captain Butler, Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills District were instrumental in fixing the boundary line between Naga Hills and Manipur in the year 1872. Likewise, Sir James Johnston, who was the Political Agent between 1877-86, set up a Border Commission and erected stone pillars on both sides of the Nanniya River to settle the eastern border issue of Manipur in 1881. This arrangement, which was based on the well-known ‘Pemberton imaginary line’, was so controversial that it was argued to have been a contributing factor of the Third Anglo-Burmese War.

The Manipur-Chin Boundary Commission, a commission made up of only British officers, which was tasked with the responsibility of settling the southern boundary of Manipur, drew a boundary line in 1894 using the ambiguous imaginary Pemberton line as a basis to finalise their conclusions.¹⁸ Pemberton delineated the southern boundary of Manipur by speculatively drawing a boundary across this area in 1834, which allotted the northern Chin Hills to the state of Manipur¹⁹ despite admitting that he had never visited the area.²⁰ As a consequence, the Zos were effectively divided between the hills south of the Kingdom of Manipur and the Chin Hills in Burma (Myanmar).²¹ Pau suggests that the wrongful incorporation of up to 19 Zou villages, 15 Thadou villages, and 13 Guite villages into Manipur was recognised by the British officials themselves.²² That the natives did not recognise this imaginary line and that they had their own ritualistic understanding of boundaries and territories did not matter to the British. According to Piang, while the influence of the Manipur Raja was ‘concentrated only in the valley’, the Political Agent would occasionally exert his influence over the hill inhabitants through a Liaison Officer known as Lambu, and would seek to bring them under their purview indirectly. These hill areas would come under more direct control and administration of the British rule only after an uprising called the ‘Kuki Uprising’ [Zo Gaal], which took place between 1917-19. It was the scale and form of this uprising that finally led to the consolidation of Manipur as a state by the British and resulted in the introduction of new administrative arrangements that divided the entire hill areas surrounding the valley into four sub-divisions, as a preventive measure to avoid repetitions of such occurrences.²³

While both the Kingdom of Manipur and the hill areas that surrounded them came under the direct rule and indirect supervision of the British respectively, these areas and their inhabitants never shared the sense of being part of one administrative rule. Their history of relationship was one that was centred primarily around mistrust (and often conflict), with the Zo chiefs and the Rajas often resorting to raids and counter-raids, especially when perceived boundaries of their territories were seen to be encroached. Although the hill areas of South Manipur were politically incorporated and projected as part of the ‘hill-fences’ that surround and protect the Kingdom of Manipur, these areas were always closely intertwined with the Chin Hills and the Lushai Hills socially and culturally, and this continues to remain so even today. The spread of Christianity, especially by the native workers across these Zo Hills, presents one of the most important testaments to this socio-cultural bond that the Zos share as kin, i.e. as one people-group.

The Question Concerning Zo Agency

For the Zo people-group who inhabit the hill ranges of what is often categorised as ‘Zo country’,²⁴ the question of agency is intrinsically tied to the reconstruction of the disruption of their lived spirit-worlds, the cartographic remapping and fragmentation of their inhabited territories, and the reimagination and repostulation of their identities in the aftermath of their encounter with the British Empire. The reduction of these complex oral traditions to descriptive written accounts by colonial ethnographers and administrators, primarily out of their concern for manageable subjugation and census requirements following their expansionist policies, have meant that these lived traditions were sentenced to the representations and imaginations of the colonial pen. The expeditions undertaken by the colonial ethnographers empowered the authors with a free reign to imagine and re-draw the entire landscape of these terrains, even as they acquired validity and visibility in their documented texts, and formed what Biswas and Suklabaidya called ‘a landscape of colonisation’.²⁵ The re-drawing of these landscapes by colonial ethnographers not only represented imagined boundaries but also served as the justification for the re-arrangement of ‘cultures’ and ‘identities’ under new and imposed categories. The classification of the plethora of Zo communities under colonial categories such as ‘Chin’, ‘Kuki’ and ‘Lushai’ was a clear mis-representation that have haunted serious Zo scholars even to the current date. This semiotic re-construction of the physical terrain and re-arrangement of ethnic identities was to serve as a justification (including moral) for the military intrusion into the hills, and the ensuing attempt to produce subjugated peoples under the supervision of the superior British Empire.²⁶

While Biswas and Suklabaidya note that this subjugation of the ‘defeated communities’ was so strategic that it left enough room ‘for the natives to think of themselves as sovereign unto themselves as well as being useful to their masters’,²⁷ and implied that the introduction of Christianity that ensued was in no small part directly responsible for producing subjugated peoples, the reception and appropriation of the Christian narrative by the Zos was not as linear or straightforward a process as commonly projected in hindsight. As much as the introduction of literacy allowed the Zos to read and understand the laws and regulation of the colonial state – an act which was taken as the justification for the disciplining and penalising that often followed – the introduction of literacy and the translations of Scripture in the local dialects were also important for contextualising the new Christian narrative, and particularly for appropriating the methods of its transformation of a narrative or