“But we hear you take heads up there.”
“Oh, yes, we do,” he replied, and seizing a boy by the
head, gave us in a quite harmless way an object-lesson how they did it.”
The above conversation took place
between Mary Mead Clark, an American missionary in British India, and a Naga
tribesman, and is quoted in Clark’s book, A Corner in India (1907).
Nagaland is a tiny state in the
Northeast of India: just twice the size of the Lakhimpur Kheri district in
Uttar Pradesh. In that little corner of India live people belonging to 16 (if
not more) distinct tribes who speak more than 30 dialects. These tribes “defy a
common nomenclature,” writes Hokishe Sema, former chief minister of the state,
in his book, Emergence of Nagaland. Each tribe is quite unique as far as
culture and social setups are concerned. Even in physique and appearance, they
vary significantly. The Nagas don’t like the common label given to them by
outsiders, according to Sema.
Nagaland is only 0.5% of India in
area. This little state has such diversity that can be quite baffling to a
visitor. The hills were quite intractable when the Christian missionaries
arrived there during the British Raj, and the tribesmen weren’t quite
hospitable. Your head could become a piece of decoration in one of those huts
there: a symbol of the head-hunter’s bravery, honour, and status.
It is to such a land that Mary Clark
and her husband took their religion of ‘love-your-enemy.’ Today Nagaland is a
Christian state with 90% of the population identifying as Christian,
predominantly Baptist. The Clarks were Baptists.
Christianity transformed the
tribespeople radically. It was a change for the better whichever way you look
at it. It is quite amusing that the BJP is the second largest party in the
present Nagaland Legislative Assembly. The culture that the BJP has been trying
to promote has nothing to do with the culture of the people of Nagaland –
neither the pre-Christian nor the present.
I’m taking Nagaland just as an
example, merely because the state has so much diversity in spite of the
superficial homogenisation brought upon it by Christianity. The BJP’s professed
objective is to “decolonise” Indian collective psyche by bringing back the
original, ancient Hindu culture and civilisation. Is that objective any
different from what Macaulay, whom Narendra Modi seems to hate the most, aimed
for? Macaulay imposed British culture and civilisation on India; Modi imposes
the Hindutva culture which is as alien to large communities of people in India
as was Macaulay’s package. Nagaland is a glaring example.
My cousin, Jacob Matheikal, drew my
attention last night to an article
by Anirudh Kanisetti in The Print. It is that article which prompted me
to write this post. Titled Not just Nehru, even Hindutva stems from Macaulay
legacy, the article argues that the Modi legacy is no different from the
Macaulay legacy and concludes with these pertinent questions:
When will we be able to
create a sense of the past that doesn’t buy into colonial binaries, which
acknowledges that no age, except the present, can be Golden for us all? When
will all regional languages and cultures be spoken of with the reverence once reserved
for English, and now for Sanskrit? And when will the voices of marginalised
peoples, ignored and spoken over century after century, stop being jailed,
persecuted, appropriated? Then, and only then, will we no longer be enslaved.
PS. The tribal people of the Northeast India are exceptionally gifted in music. Their music, in my dilettante understanding, is a unique blend of the tribal with the Western rhythms. Let me bring you the musical concert presented by one Naga choir at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in Christmas 2012.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFKxc3Siwtk
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